Day 11

Today, we just need to finish soldering color & line sensor
and professor mason also explained how the competition is going to be

There will be few cans with different color being place in the middle
our mission is to make the robot determine which color the can is and make the can be in the correct section


later, I put the line sensor into the car

and it works!!!

even thought I burned out the one of the emiter

Day 10 - Building Sensors for your Robot

There are two sensors which are line sensor and color sensor
Since we have two people in a team, the work has been seperated
and I chose to make the line sensor


The line sensor is made up by the phototransistor

Phototransistors are phtodiode-amplifer combinations intergrated within a single silicon chip

Follow the schematic

With one of Emitter and one Detector
We will get

The one with the black tape around is the detector and the other one is Emitter
We will not able to see the light came out from the emitter, so we will need to have a camera point at it to see teh light

After finishing the circuit on the breadboard
We went to the fabrication room to solder these component

Day 9 - Vex Programming

Today, we took out our square bot and started to program it
first we will need to plug the cable into the PC

And you might need to download the prolific driver for the cable


plug the other end  to the serial port of the vex car

clear the memory in the car and you are able to start the programming

Our first goal is to get to the red box

The first method we are going to use is just estimate the distance and guess the amount of the the car will need to travel each section

we just need
power of the motor * amount of time it turns

this method is not really accuarte
for most of the student
the card is not even on the track but going all over the places


After done with this one
we were partner up with one other person
my partner is JOSE
and we will modify his vex car to do the next experiment


we will extend the front wheel axis so we are able to put the roataional sensor in

The red part is the sensor

and this time we will use how many rotations turn inorder to calculate the distance it travels

That is how our car goes
We were kind of out of time
so for few sections we just guess the number of roataion
and that cuz the car went wrong in the middle

Day 8 - Evaluate hacking toy and 555timer, Oscilloscopes and Servos

While we are doing the  555timer handout
Professor mason needed to evaluate our first project, Hacking a toy

Overall, the score of my robot was pretty high
and I'm really surpised



Later, we were introduced a new chip, the 555 timer

It a very comment chip that it is still using in these modern day

The function of this chip is just control the timing of the output


Follow the schematic

After you are done with it
we replace either R1 or R2 with a 10K pot
and you will get

Later, we change the LED to a sounder
If the LED flashes too fast, we were not able to observed by our eye, but we can observed by the ear

Next, we are going to learn how to use an oscilloscope
After finishing the basic learning function of the oscilloscope

We need to connect the oscilloscope probe to the 555 circuit at pin 3 and another end at the negative leg of the sounder

we are suppose to get this reading on the oscilloscope

and here is the video for changing the pot effect the oscilloscope

Day 7 - Hacking the toy

Day 7

It is a simple day
We were just need to finish our first individual project

For mine toy, a music talking toy
I just need to learn how does the sounder work and connect to the circuit

Project 1 : Toy Hacking

The purpose of this project is to combine all the techniques which we learned from the previous classes

The main goal of the toy need to be
1. Control by the microcontroller
2. Need to have some forms of input from user to toy
3. Using software to control the general movement of the toy


Here is my toy

For the toy, I am using a PC with a serial port connect to the microcontroller to control the movment of the toy
I also make the sounder connect to the microcontroller so I can play the music


With the serial input mode of the microcontroller, I am able to send a letter to the microcontroller and it can response the input with a certain action that I programed such as playing a music with action of the toy at the same time
I can also seperate the movement so the toy can either just play the music or just have some kind of action


Unfortuentely, the toy I have has two motoer, but for some reason the motor that controls the body movement does not work
So, I am only able to control the mouth movement, which is open or close


I also add one song that is not build-in in the microcontroller

Day 6 - Interfacing to a Microcontroller and Hacking a Toy

Yesterady, we learned about how to use and how does a microcontroller do

today, we change a little bit on the circuit board

this time we use a 200mA incandescnet bulb instead of the LED

It took me a while to figure out how it works
I switch the direction of the transistor, and that cuase the transistor got really hot after letting the light up

after this, we were introduced a more powerful transistor so we can use the circuit for our hacking toy

we just took out the light build, and it will become like this

now we just need to hack the toy
the main goal of hacking a toy is to find the wires for the motor and extended so we can control the motor in the toy

after putting the wires into the circuit board, we were able to control the motin of the motor no