4/29

TODAY WAS A SUCCES!!! We attached both the pinger and the line follower! After we removed the grabber, we started on the pinger. Even though it was a bit difficult to do, we followed through and got the pinger working properly! It maneuvers its way through objects blocking its path and doesn’t run into anything! I didn't take a video for you guys to see, however I do have a picture of what the bot now looks like!

We also built and wired the line follower, but it isn’t quite working yet. We have some kinks to work out but it shouldn’t be long before everything is ready to go! Tomorrow we put the finishing touches on our robot and begin working on our final presentation! We have definitely come a long way and I couldn’t be more proud of the progress we have made! I am so thankful for my awesome partner! 

4/27

Today was not a good day for us. We wanted to attach the pinger and line follower, but since the other team already has a line follower on their Boe-Bot, Mrs. Vestal thought we should do the grabber and pinger instead. We all agreed to it and moved forward with the building. 

However, that did not work out for us in our favor. 

This is Jordyns' 'sad face' because we failed! :(

After assembling the grabber, we realized we weren’t going to be able to fit the pinger attachment on the Boe-Bot. So, we decided to get rid of the grabber and just go with the line follower and pinger. We didn’t have much time left in the day so we wrapped everything up and headed home. It was definitely a bump in the road and set us back for time. But, we will overcome this and hopefully we’ll be back on track by Wednesday!

4/22

Today, Jordyn and I ran more programs on our Boe-Bot. We tested some programs for the speaker and ran one to make it sing Yankee Doodle! The video below shows the bot singing. Jordyn was also able to make the sound link with the LEDs on the breadboard so every time a new note was played, a different colored LED would flash! 

We were really excited to be able to do this because it means we are learning and applying our knowledge to our project! We were planning on building the line follower and pinger attachment to our Boe-Bot, but we weren’t able to get our parts. So that is on the ‘to do’ list for next week. We also started to make a rough draft of our course for the final presentation. We decided on writing a program to make our Boe-Bot move forward, backward, turn left, and turn right. We are also going to include the Yankee Doodle song and LED show as well. We didn’t get as much as we wanted accomplished today, but next week will be better!

4/21 Progress

Today, Jordyn and I accomplished even more!
We  built our Boe-Bot today to actually look like a robot. We attached the servos to the BOE, we put the wheels on the servos, and connected the BOE to the frame.We ran different programs on our Boe-Bot to make it move clockwise, counterclockwise, make sound, and reverse!

Below is a picture of the improved version of last week. In the picture you can see all the work we put into the Boe-Bot today. Here, it is connected to Jordyn's computer so we could test run different programs!

These pictures show our concentration during the whole time. As you can see we worked as a team! Whether we were both learning from the mistake we just made, or laughing because of how silly we realized the mistake was! We had a great time today and we both learned so much! I can't wait to start programming the Boe-Bot to do what we want! Stay tuned :)

4/15

TODAY WE STARTED  PROGRAMMING!!

Jordyn and I worked very hard today and got so much accomplished! We started working with writing codes, and figuring out binary numbers, making LEDs emit light, and so much more!

We finished all of the 'help' pages in the software and got all the way to chapter 3 in the manual! We connected LEDs and Resistors to our Breadboard and got the LEDs to emit light. We changed the codes to make our lights blink faster and slower.

There are some pictures below and in some you can see our excitement!

In this picture we were going over the different parts on the BOE.

Here, you can see how concentrated Jordyn was while writing the codes!

This video shows us writing a code, running the code, and watching our output!

We had so much fun today and learned a lot! I am so excited to see how far we get next week!

4/13

Today we finalized our WBS & Gantt Chart. We turned both of them in and downloaded the program for our Boe-Bot and Matchware. We messed around a little bit with both programs and tried to figure out what each program could do. We didn't get much further than this but there is more to come!

4/1 Boe Bot Progress

Today was mostly focused around our WBS & Gantt Chart. I took over working on the WBS while Jordyn worked with the Gantt Chart on Excel. We have been working very well together in finding out each others strengths and weaknesses.

To view our WBS there is a link below.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13NrwvU8jAFbc6YPQYQ2soFramVmjE3bKCpH-cvefKX4/edit#gid=0

Our Gantt Chart was used in Excel and we weren't able to make it into a shared document. However, it was very well put together by Jordyn. Every step in the WBS is used in our Gantt.

After the break we should be ready to start building and programming our boe-bot! Stay tuned. :)

3/30 Day 3

On Monday, we presented our first problem statement to the class. Our first problem statement was, "waking up in the middle of the night and trying to find the way to your bedroom door can be dangerous." We were going to build and program our Boe-Bot to lead and clear a pathway to your door for safe traveling. After some constructive criticism from our peers and professor, we decided to go back to the drawing board. This week we thought of a completely different approach for our Boe-Bot

Our new problem statement is,

Engineering 150 students will have a better understanding of what a Boe-Bot is and what it can do, prior to beginning the project. With our help, novice engineering students will feel confident and secure about completing their final project.

COA’s EGR 150 class requires students to complete a major project, all students in this course are expected to build and program a Boe-bot to complete different tasks. Some students may not have the technical background needed to construct something of this nature and could feel intimidated or overwhelmed by the project. With this mindset, many students may procrastinate on the project, or not even complete it. If we ignore this problem, increased levels of stress, procrastination and lack of motivation may cause some students to drop the course.

We will build and program a Boe-Bot as well as demonstrate its abilities in order to provide engineering students with the knowledge needed to begin building a Boe-Bot. We will also document the building process and the demonstration itself in a video. This video will be available for future classes to watch and will be shown during the introduction of the project.

We are excited to begin building! For now, enjoy your Spring Break and stay tuned for future posts! :)