20th September
Today we built our raspberry pi computer and coded it to make a light flash on and off! We learnt a lot- it was such a cool process seeing our code have instant visible effects. Overall, the process of building both the computer and coding a light to turn on took about an hour and a half. It was a very successful day.
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27th September
Today we finalised our application to Pi wars. We are very hopeful that we will get in- it would be an amazing opportunity to learn and develop our coding and robotics skills!!
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October 11th
Today we found out our application was accepted into pi wars! We were very excited and began designing and building a rough draft of our robot. We built a draft robot in order to test out different elements of the robot such as wheels and skeleton. We also have decided to base our robot off of one of our favourite disaster movies- Don't look up. We loved this movie and we think it will be a super fun experience incorporating the movie into the design of our robot!!!
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November 1st
Today we continued working on our robot. We finalised it's structure and began coding it. We also worked on the design of our final robot. Some challenges were that we came very close to finishing our robot, however we needed a piece for the robot that we did not have in the school in order to finish it.
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November 8th
Today we finished the robot draft, as the piece we needed was ordered and arrived at school in time! We continued coding our robot, which took awhile. We noticed that the code for our robot was very similar to the code needed for mini bits- hopefully this knowledge will be useful in the future when we continue developing our code!
November 15th
We finished coding our robot and worked on the final design.
November 22
Today we worked on summarising what we had done so far and making a plan and schedule for the future. Our robot was not moving as clearly as we wanted, and we figured this was due to either the code, the wheels, or the soldering.
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November 29th
Today, we fixed the soldering and started building our finalised version of our robot. The soldering was easily fixed, but fixing the final design was harder than anticipated and we were not able to finish. Next week, we hope to edit the code, test the robot, and finish building the final robot.
December 6th
Today, we finished building the structure of the final robot. This included attaching wheels to the motor, finishing the two layers of bases and the structure of the final robot.
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☆☆Winter Break ☆☆
January 17th
Today, we focused mainly on our technical and artistic merit and our balloon stand. Both things went fairly well, and it was a productive session.
January 24th
Today, Elle was ill and could not attend the session. I (Clara) worked on attaching the balloon to the robot.
January 31th
Today, we worked on steering the robot and we practiced stabbing another team's balloon! It was fun but we realised that we needed to use a needle as opposed to a pin because a pin was not sharp enough. We also needed to adjust the top of our balloon stand because the balloon was not properly fitting.
February 7th
Today, we worked on fixing our balloon stand so it could properly fit the balloon, making sure to test it out (learning from our previous mistake) It worked, and we spent the remainder of the time working on our website.
☆☆February Break ☆☆
February 21st
Today, we installed the video camera. This took awhile, but once we were finished we tested it out. It worked!! The video feed was surprisingly quite a good quality and we worked on practicing driving whilst using the feed for practice. However, we realised that the feed for the video camera was too narrow so we decided to replace it with a different one.
February 28th
Clara was unable to attend, so I (Elle) worked on the technical and artistic merit in the competition.
March 6th
Today, we worked on changing out the video camera for one with a wider video feed. We also worked on technical and artistic merit and our blog! The contest is quite soon so we are so excited and have started to finalise our robot design.
March 13th
Today, we worked on attaching the claw and the new camera to the robot. Both weren't too challenging, and we didn't run into any major difficulties whilst doing this (which is good because the contest is soon!!)
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March 21st
Today we worked on practicing driving our robot around- it was so cool to see our robot in action after so many weeks of preparation!
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☆☆Easter Break ☆☆
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Today, we worked on finalising the technical and artistic merit. The competition is this weekend and we are so excited!!! It is going to be so fun to put into practice everything we have been working on. It has been such a fun year of robotics and our skills in this subject have improved significantly in so many aspects of csct. It has been an amazing experience so far and we are looking forward to this Saturday!!
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