Blog | Black Thunder

Over the past few weeks, we have been unable to run Robotics Club as usual at school, so the team spent two full days (approximately 20 hours) together working on the FLL. Most of this was spent on building attachments; we now have six independent attachments and one add-on. We also completed our robot game plan towards the start of the month; this specifies which missions will be completed in each run, and also gives routes to each of the mission models, viz.: This plan allows coding to be far more efficient, as we can use the My Blocks we created (moveForward, which takes a value in centimetres; leftTurn, which takes an angle in degrees; and more) to perform the required movement, inputting rough values to start with and then refining them. We find this to be the most efficient method of coding. Over the past two weeks, Matthew has been hard at work coding our robot; we have now completed run one and half of run two. All of our FLL code is open-source and available online at...

Building Attachments In the final week of term, some of the older students have been building attachments for our FLL robot. These will be multi-use attachments, with the aim being to make our robot & runs as efficient as possible. We currently have an attachment for use with the payloads & core extraction and will produce multiple more before the competition day. Coding the Robot Today, Matthew was adding experimental values for movement in run 1, creating the script to lower and send the payloads onto/down the ramp and drafting the rest of the runs. The speed of coding should ramp up considerably with only a few weeks left until the competition and an operational robot. Project The project is coming along nicely; the team has decided to solve the problem of cosmic radiation in space. Our idea is to create a magnetic shield - more details to come!