The Chronicals of RodneyBeta

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My goal is to build a robot using the Lego Mindstorm kit to propell my skatebooard.

Rodney's Chronicles

• Day One: I discovered that Rodney could actually push my skateboard. This meant that I could truly use it to propell my skateboard. This was the first step to building my robot. My next step will be to make Rodney
• Day Two: I attached touch sensors to my robot and tried to get Rodney to turn and go straight in corespondence to the activated touch sensors. I got Rodney to successfully turn left, right, go straight and reverse by using the touch sensors, but he had problems doing reverse left and right turns. I also had trouble with the long connection wires impeding Rodney's way occassionally, so I decided to start making a controller for him. I plan to work on the controller more exstinsively next time.
• Day Three: I created a controller with buttons. I had trouble with the button design, so I just used the touch sensors bare for the moment. I had trouble with the SendMessage() command between the two RCXs, so I got help from Brad. We got tested to see if the message was being sent by using PlaySound() when a message was sent and recieved. When we got that I got help from Ned, a fellow student who told me about SetTxPower(TX_POWER_HI) to extend the reach of my signal. This was a great help, because I could control Rodney from much further now. I still a have problems with doing reverse turns, but things are looking up. I think im going to work on the button design and reverse turns next.
• Day Four: I skipped the button design and worked right on the reverse turning. I found that when I change Rodney's if/else if/else to do while if/else if/else statements, and based them on oone bottun being touched, not touched. Then I saw that when Rodney had one motor going foward at a lower speed and the other going reverse for reverse turns looked identical to his foward turns, so I had the other motor float, instead of foward.
• Day Five: I'm finished, Rodney is really fun to play with. I hope that someday Ican make an alpha form of him. I went through numorous forms of a limo-style for Rodney wit hthe RCX near-floating in the back so he could roll under my skateboard perfectly. Some had motors, a couple had a sled-like apperatus, a a few used had different sizes of wheels trying to lift the RCX so it didn't slide on the floor. Sara and Brad helped me to get Rodney to where he is. I used Liza's camera too get pictures of Rodney in action, so thank you to everyone that helped me get here, thank you to COSMOS, to my parents, to my teacher/college advisor Mr. Hernandez, to Brad, Sara, Professor Dad-dell, to my fellow students Ned and Liza.