With our Robot built by Friday it was quite nice to be able to relax a little bit over the weekend giving me time to think about ways to improve our design and play around a little bit with Mindstorm looking at different ways of programming and also looking at a few projects that other people had worked on in the past some which were quite interesting like spider-like robots with pens as legs and paint catapult style robot that reloaded automatically before flinging different coloured paint filled water balloons at a wall creating a splatter painting. Though I thought these ideas were quite cool they didn't really help me come up with any ways to really develop our idea much further. Well after we all got in we started work straight away and I immediately set myself the task of figuring out what was wrong with the programming from the previous Friday. When it came to controlling the robot through music I had set up a basic loop that showed that once the sound sensor picked up a certain volume the robot would move forward and once the music was below that volume the robot would make a right turn. Well when we were testing the robot all we could get was the robot to go in circles because the sound of the robots own engine would activate movement but not enough to keep it going in a straight line. Even when we tried playing music through our laptops at maximum volume we couldn't get the sensor to pick up the amount of volume needed to keep the robot moving straight, now my immediate thought was to drop the amount of volume needed to get the robot going in a straight line only dropping that level meant having to decrease even more the volume that could be heard when the robot was made to spin and with the robots motor already posing a problem with the amount of noise output this posed a pretty big problem. That problem was solved quite quickly when I decided we clearly needed more volume in the music and a more powerful sound system, luckily I had just bought a new set of speakers the previous week and decided to see if they would work. Lee also had taken an interest in the idea of the clubbing scene and had seen a picture of a DJ’s turn table in a club that had been photographed with a time lapse a similar idea to one of our original robot concepts so we decided to merge the two of our original concepts into one and added on a variety of different finger lights onto the robot to give us another dimension to the art we were creating. Overall we had a productive day and our robot is really becoming quite refined giving us time to work on how we will present our idea to the class for Friday.
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