Sunday, February 15, 2009

February 15th

Today we had our first meeting after our month-long break. The first thing we did was talk about the letter that Alex sent to the Water UN Limited Corporation (who made the Max Water windmill), letting them know that we would like any information about the windmilll they can release, and that we would like to help them with field testing. Nic also told us that he's working on his article for Muse and Alex has finished writing an article for the UnderAge Page, but he still needs to find some photos for it.

During the meeting Cheyne and Nic tried to use a differential with BURT; unfortunately it didn't work. Mr. Jaworski showed us how to connect it properly, but we still couldn't accomplish it. We hoped the differential would improve the frame and make the robot turn more effectively, but it only works with one motor and we need the power we get from having two motors to be successful.

Alex, David and Max built the Zippy-Bot from the new NXT book we recently acquired. It was much faster than BURT, but the motors pull and we could not connect the Ultrasonic Sensor so that it could see the wall. Therefore, we have decided not to use it. We hoped to create a different robot to see if we could learn something from that to make BURT better. We learned we like BURT's accuracy better than Zippy-Bot and we really need to focus our time and attention on BURT.

Next meeting, we are going to work on strengthening our current framework for BURT, and on making a replica. Alex is going to work on a new arm that will allow BURT to accomplish another mission.