Archive for July 11th, 2011
Day 5: Monday, 7/11
by Nicolas Fuchs on Jul.11, 2011, under Week 2
Today we spent the majority of the day working on Labview programming, since we figured out how to get the DC motors and Servos running. We realized that the NXT to RCX cables (attached to long RCX cables and then back again to NXT) that we’d been using were preventing the DC motors/servos from working. Upon using pure NXT cables, they started working again. We wrote a variety of code; code to test DC motors, code to test servo motors, code to test NXT motors. A sample code, btns_DC, is shown below. The code turns on the DC motors corresponding to the buttons pressed on the NXT brick: left button = left turn, right button = right turn, orange button = go forward. We attempted to create a switch to reverse motion by using the left and right arrow simultaneously, but the buttons became glitchy. Testing this code was frustrating because sometimes the NXT became buggy and the buttons stopped working; in order to fix this one would need to restart the NXT (but distinguishing between when the code was broken and when the NXT was broken was annoying).
Daily Thoughts:
Dean: Worked on TANK
Lawrence: This day wasn’t a very exciting day it was more on the boring side but that’s because all I did was mainly more programming so that I could learn more about it. The buttons code Nick had mainly made but I just finished it for him so that I could eventually make the code myself. It was just for learning per purposes.
Jess: I spent this day working on my walking robot some more. It had been pretty lame and broken when I left it for the weekend, so I fixed it up. I mostly just experimented with the Legos and Tetrix and Labview.
Sarah: Today I focused on basic programming of TETRIX motors.
