Blog | Black Thunder

Internationals Suspended Unfortunately, the news came in that this First season has been suspended due to the Corona virus outbreak and therefore none of the International events will happen for now. Even then, the UK has banned all international school trips in precaution of the virus. Though this means that we probably won't be going to internationals, we will continue to finish NOVA; our new Robot. We are also working on building a Rubiks cube solving robot for a fun, side project.. We will continue to update the situation as to whether this First season will stay suspended.

Internationals Week 3 - 2 Building Work continues on nova as we have finished the back and some of the side plating of the robot.The front wall with the motor attached to it is being worked on. This is because it is easier to have one fixed motor and one moving motor  then two stationary motors on the robot. The wall is very useful as it can be used for every mission as for the stacks it won't need to be moved. and we can attach the stacks attachment to it.  Project We are contacting professionals to see if there are any improvements can be made to our app. We called the local university and they have put us in contact with a professor that gives lectures there. We hope that he gives us his honest opinions so we can impress the judges in Rio.

Contacting Building As normal the building team continues on the creation of Nova, Eric's step-sister. Although, now with some structure it could go along smoothly and quickly, picking up pace as they got used to Nova's build ,which however it might look like Eric from the outside, is vastly different. This session they focused on making sure the light sensors were correctly positioned while also making sure that the brick is easily accessible, especially the battery compartment.  Coding This session was just for coding the sensors to work for line following, theoretically as we hadn't tested it out yet because Nova wasn't fully completed and able to stand up without support as the front wasn't existent. Project The letters, to be handed out to potential experts on machine learning, are being completed and proofread to be sent out in the near future. Along with this, their is a general version for a base purpose but there will specific personal em...

NOVA in Progress Building Again, today we focused mostly on building, as building the new bot (called Nova) is our highest priority. We have begun to connect the motors to the brick using wires, so that we can build around the base structure of the robot, without having to worry about fitting in the wires afterwards. This will make building our robot more time efficient, due to the fact that NOVA will be ready to test code as soon as possible. Also, using feedback from Nationals, we are taking inspiration to make our bot from the internet and including elements of different robots, making sure it is an original, but still taking and expanding on what we have learned. Core Values Today, we all displayed our core value of Inclusion, where all of us were collaborating and working together, to maximise productivity. This led to some people building or assembling parts onto NOVA, building parts separately and getting the pieces themselves. Due to this, we also did one of the most...

NOVA has been born... Eric has drifted one time too many. We have named our new robot NOVA, as we thought it was about time that the team became more inclusive. While we pondered about where to place the gyro - more accurately, placing sensors in random positions and shaking the robot violently till the sensors didn't fall off, progress on our secret weapon continued - if all goes well and NOVA lives up to expectations, our disappointing Robot Game at Nationals should be long in our past. Our Bridge also received some much-needed TLC - we found that it helps when your missions are actually fully built. Heartbreak The Wall has fallen. As NOVA continues to grow and gain weight, our once-to-be secret weapon has been discarded in favour of a simpler, easier to implement solution built into NOVA. Needless to say, we're all hurting. Now the Wall lies crumbling, irrelevant, obsolete. Some of us will get over our loss today, and perhaps NOVA will be far better than the...

New Bot! Building We all focused on building this session as we didn't want to waste time. Again we harnessed the power of the Core Values and all came together to make a new bot in time for internationals that will no longer drift. The old bot was very old and the wires were being worn down. Also, the model had complications such as the axle the motor used was grinding against another piece producing a white dust that was getting stuck in the motor causing the bot to stutter. All the weight was being transferred to the same axle so the whole bot was on the brink of destruction yet still won us regional and somehow robot design. Core Values We are all coming together again to act as one entity rather than working individually to achieve the goal of creating the new robot. This is a very challenging task as we have only allotted an hour to achieve this. We have been bouncing off each others' ideas and have landed on one that is a mixture of many. We will still however...

Reconsidering our run plan. FLL We are reconsidering our run plan as we don't think it is as effective as it could be as we aren't scoring enough points. We wan't to do short runs that score a lot points for us and that will work consistently so that if we don't complete a run we won't have wasted a lot of time. The runs are becoming shorter  so we get more runs in our two and a half minutes. We are also modifying our linear actuator so that it not just moves vertically it also moves laterally this means we can complete the missions that use the linear actuator more easily.This is because the robot doesn't need to tun it just moves the attachment sideways. We are also designing a funnel for the blue block that comes off the crane. So that we get 50 points more.    

Brainstorming FLL First session back and we have a lot improvement on, we split our thoughts into the four categories; Project, Robot Game, Robot Design and Core Values. We looked at our Rubrics systematically and thought about what to change to get more points. We also started to put our tasks that we need to do onto a website called Click Up that allows members of a team to see what each other is doing and if the task is completed or not. I am sure you have heard of Monday.com, this website very similar to that. For Core values, we need to make sure that all of the team members speak and contribute to the discussion with the judges, although the judges were impressed by us in robot design we need to make sure that their is something unique about our robot so that it is something new and different form the other competitors. We are also looking at different ways that we can do runs in different combinations. We are deciding that maybe if we incorporate the bridge mission we coul...

Nationals - Robot Design 1st Place! Yesterday, on the 22/2/2020, Black Thunder went to compete in the National Championship for England and Wales, at the University of the West of England. When the 9 of us, along with 4 mentors and coaches, arrived, we unloaded our minibus and headed to the pits. We then attended the opening ceremony and a member of our team proudly carried out banner proclaiming us to be the Champions of the North London Regional. The first event in our timetable was our first Robot Game at 10'o'clock and though we went in with high hopes, we only scored 120 points. This was disappointing, but we still had more events to compete for and had more opportunities to improve our robot score.  Next, we had our Innovation Project, which was the Parking Bot app (available on the Google Play Store). Our presentation went quite well and we received some feedback that would come in very useful for internationals. Following that, we had our second robot game, in whic...