EMCC Student Conference Experience

This week at SSTEM most of the interns were at the Estrella Mountain Community College Student Conference Thursday the 28th. We had four posters including mine and two interns did oral presentation. The poster session went well I was nervous at first since presenting isn't my favorite but after a few minutes I wasn't nervous at all and the words just flowed out. It was great sharing my project with the judges and other students there at EMCC. The majority of them thought it was so cool doing a project of robots and I had a video of me driving my robot and actually scoring a goal. Although I didn't win this was a great experience and I took a lot away from it. Everybody did great with their posters and oral presentation. There were many student from all over with great projects as well that were very interesting. Congratulations to Oliver and Bethany who were able to win 3rd and 2nd place in the poster session great job. I also want to thank the mentors for being there for support Josh and Corri sorry if I spelled your name wrong. Awesome experience. Here's some pics of our posters.

Friendly Robotics Competition so Far

     This week we managed to do some of the test towards the competition of this semester with my robot against Lily's. The speed round we did by doing a 50 ft forward and back drag race down the hallway outside of the STEM room in E-224 I believe. We each had 3 runs to calculate an average run time for each of us. My average ended up being around 58 seconds and Lily's was over a minute I believe but I was able to beat her in the speed round. The next competition we did was the manual or driver control shooting round which is only one minute long. We each had 3 trials again to score as many balls as possible in the goals, but unfortunately I lost in the manual competition with only 11 points while Lily was able to score 20 points. Her robot's launcher shot really farther than mine and she had good accuracy. Another test that I did was the autonomous portion which is programming the robot to score the points on its own and I was able to get 11 points in 3 trials. Lily still hasn't done this part of the competition so my results and data are still pending but I'm hoping she doesn't beat me! After this last test we just need to weigh each one of our robots and calculate the total cost of each to have our data complete. Overall this was a really fun project and I enjoyed working with these robots so much.

It finally drives straight! Who will I be up against in the end?

      This week in STEM I was able to fix a HUGE flaw that my robot had ever since it was able to move. That flaw was that whenever I drove my robot one of the motors was faster than the other so my robot would drive off to one side more than the other making it impossible to drive in a straight line. This made driving the robot a hassle and it took so much time away in trying to get to the balls and to get to the goals. Well this week after noticing that the program on the motors of the robot was not the issue I pulled off the two motors that move the back wheels and noticed that one of them was a high speed and the other was just a regular motor so after making it a high speed motor that fixed the problem. It was amazing seeing my robot drive straight and since I was used to driving it the other way I need to practice on the field to get the hang of it now, I'm sure this is going to help out a lot in terms of time and being able to score more points in that one minute period. Here's an image of exactly how I felt when I saw my robot drive in a straight line. I'm trying to upload a video of the robot driving not sure if it will upload though.