CS 570 Project 3: Impress the Intructor

Due:

Demo and report due with exit interview. Individual groups will set a time for their demo and interview sometime between Friday May 6th and Thursday may 12th inclusive. A signup sheet will be available shortout inside the lab. Intermediate proposal due earlier - see below

Description:

This project is an open ended free form project. Your job is to build a robot and write a program that will impress your instructor. Keep in mind that your instructor has full access to the world wide web and any project that is too close to one already on display in cyberspace will not be very impressive.

Intermediate deliverable: a proposal

You need to propose a project idea by Monday April 25th at 5pm. You should indicate what you plan to have your robot do, and what "brain" you plan to work with, and the basic sensors that you think you need to make your robot do what you plan to make it do. The proposal need only be about a paragraph long and should be emailed to your instructor by 5pm of the 25th. Your instructor will then get back to you that evening with any reservations about your projects or any hints to steer you in another direction if what you plan sounds unfeasable for our robots.

Your parts:

For this lab, in addition to the lego technic kits you will have the following materials to work with:

Microcontrollers

One handyboard

One RCX

Sensors

One bag of digital sensors for the handyboard.

One bag of analog sensors for the handyboard.

One lego light sensor

Two lego bump sensors

Motors

Two lego geared motors

Two handyboard to lego motor adapter wires.

In addition, remember I have a small number of additional pieces of lego, including a couple of lego rotation sensors,and a couple of temperature sensors. I also have several handyboard motors for those who can find a way to make use of it without damaging it. These parts will be available on a first come first served basis for those who can show that their design really needs such extra parts. Eg: you have built a robot and come say "I need three more gears to make this work". You'll get the gears if I have them. But if you come and say "We need a few more gears, the set doesn't have enough" you probably wont get them since some other group might "need" them where your group just wants them "just in case."

One caveat: Because all of the robot parts will be in use this time, I have no spare parts. Some of the handyboards and sensors appear to have quirks. I have randomized the assignment of boards between the groups (both undergrads and grads) The known quirks are the following:

One of the handyboards does not respond properly to the start button
One of the handyboards may not read properly from ET sensors in some of its analog ports.
One of the handyboard appears to have a slightly loose wire to the battery pack - taping it into a fixed position seems to be to work around to keep it running power to the board.

I'll look at all of these problems at the end of the semester, but that will require disassembling the boards - and since they work with slight work arounds, I'll not delay the lab for now. But test your board soon and decide what you can do with it. In the mean time, I randmly assigned the handyboards to different groups.