final project proposal

1. ITAS152
Lego
Mindstorms
Project Proposal
Project Proposal
Project Proposal
Group Members:
Paul Martin
Mickel Smith
William Hogeweide
themindstormproject.tk

2. The idea
Our original idea was to build a robot utilizing
a lego mindstorms nxt. Once built it would
perform various tasks utilizing the majority of
its sensors.

3. the look
During our conception phase we all thought that
the robot would look like johnny 5.
we soon realized that we were living in a fantasy
world.

4. the other look
after several rebuilds and a few macguivers our
final robot resembled frankenstein more then it
did johnny 5.
what he lacks in looks he has in charisma.

5. time management
in order to try and ensure that we could accomplish everything in
a reasonable amount of time, we created a time line.
The time line along with everything else can be viewed at our
website: themindstormproject.tk
since we live quite a ways from one another we decided to
comunicate through notes in a shared drop box folder.

6. The tasks
Original tasks:
1. locate a ball.
2. Decide if it’s red or blue
3. if red bring to a container if not throw away.
4. locate object that’s emitting sound and put it into the same
container

7. the programming
in order to accomplish our tasks we chose to use the built in nxt
gui system.

8. gui problems
as some of you may have come to realize, using the gui system
isn’t as easy as you might have thought.
just trying to understand the system took quite some time.
couldn’t manipulate the program as freely as we thought.

9. gui problems cont.
for reasons unknown to us the program we created in the gui
decided not to work and no amount of trouble shooting would
make it either.
as a last minute decision and 2 weeks to go we decided to scratch
our program and rewrite it using java.

10. java
java “thank you jeebus”.
once we figured out what methods were available to us through
the api programming it seemed to be a breeze.
one of the tasks we wanted the nxt to do we still couldn’t get it
accomplished even with java.

11. The final tasks
what we ended up with
1. locate a ball.
2. Decide if it’s red or blue
3. if red bring to a container if not throw away.
4. wait till you hear an alarm then locate ball and bring to a
container.

12. sound problems
although we were able to get the sound sensor to work we were
unable to get to be sensitive enough to know which direction the
sound was coming from.
with that in mind we altered our original idea from:
locate object that’s emitting sound and put it into the same
container.
wait till you hear an alarm then locate ball and bring to a
container.

13. more problems
what we really wanted to happen, was to have the robot locate
these objects no matter where they were put and put them into the
container.
light sensor was not accurate enough. no matter what color the
container the light reading was always to close to either ball.

14. group problems
like all groups we have had our share of problems.
One of our members got really ill and missed quite a bit of class
which hindered some of our progress.
some personal issues came about, but together we brought them
up, talked them over and found a compromise that everyone could
agree upon.

15. The video
william created a compilation video of our robot. it
includes it’s failures and successes.
the video is about 8 minutes long so sit back and enjoy the
show.
FrankenBot in action

16. the end
any questions?