Blog | Black Thunder

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...

Robot Design Robot design went extremely well for us as we ended up winning overall! We first began with a physical presentation of our bot, our attachments and our code and answered all questions the judges asked. We went through all the specifications of our bot such as our sensors and gearing system. We also showed them our attachments and a sample of our commented code. We also gave them our Pseudocode document, which said exactly what our code did and Robot Design Executive Summary, with all details of our bot. Project Parking Bot was our project; it is an app available on the Google Play Store that uses a convolution neural network to identify parking spaces. We presented our Project to judges and gave a working example of the app. We also explained how Parking Bot and convolution neural networks work. We finally gave the judges a document explaining parking bot in further detail.

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...

Nationals are near... FLL Feels like we've been here before! Once again, the FLL team is running their project past the FLL rerunners. Some key points of improvement were that we talk too fast, talk too quietly and need to clarify some points. Parking Bot also decided to act up mid presentation, creating some phantom car parking spaces on the classroom floor. With the project presently done, we swiftly moved on to the Robot Game - with the clock furiously counting down, we raced to finally implement our innovative colour sensing system - essentially color-coding our attachments so that when we use them, the colour sensors detect which attachment is being used and run the appropriate mission - saving us valuable time! Easier said than done however, as several of our mainstay challenges such as Crane and Beams also decided to act up - it looks like it'll be a close one... again. FLL Rerun Once again, the rerunners were working on their bots after they witnessed Parki...

Beaming Beams FLL The FLL team have made a breakthrough, we realised that the problem we were encountering was that the bot was going too fast into the holes of the house and therefore lost accuracy, but by using our previously-made acceleration and deceleration code in unison we can better control the velocity of the bot. The next problem is that we can only knock down four out of the six beams while keeping the house stable on top of them. This problem does not affect us as much, as we can make up those points in the stacks.  FLL - Rerun The post SUMO competitors have been taught, in a lesson by two of our FFL team members. They have been tasked to finally create their bots to tackle the mission models they made attachments for the previous sessions. They will be able to test out their code on the map later but fro now they have to imagine going around the map and doing missions.

WORKING ON PROJECT FLL Today, we mainly focused on Project and improving the aesthetic appearance of the Parking Bot app by using Google's material design, which is a design format. We are doing this as most people complained about the design format and people would be more comfortable with Google's design as they use it on lots of different apps; Google maps, etc. FLL Rerun Today, the competitors continued with their task of making their bot turn in circles. This manoeuvre could help them a lot in the missions. Some of the coders finished making their code and continued to developing the structure their bot physically and on LEGO DIGITAL DESIGNER. They will soon have more lessons on how to code successfully in EV3-G and will then be able to start to code for the missions.

Competition Day Yesterday eight of us went to the FFL regional competition in The American School In London, there were many teams, half of them from that very school. Our first match at 9:55 went horribly wrong as we had some wrong information that we could touch the bot in the placing area as we thought it was a also part of base. Through this we lost 60 points putting us in 6th place. Immediately after the first match we had our core values presentation, in which we were split in two, one part had to make an animal while the other a habitat for that animal. The two teams were allowed to communicate but cold not see what the other was making. This in its core idea was a team building exercise. At 10:55 we had our second match in which we improved our score by 25 putting us in 4th place. Next we had our robot design segment in which we had to present our bot and why we had made it as we did, the two judges drilled us looking at the functionality of our code and efficiency of our ...

More Coding FLL Today, coding is being finished for motor control and we are testing the code for the missions as we go through. Also, more attachments are being made and completed ready for future missions that we are yet to code. On top of this, We are progressing our project idea and are looking to send it to some professionals for feedback SUMO Competition  As the teams prepare for their last week before half-term and the beginning of the tournament, the pressure is definitely building as more and more teams get have friendly battles to test their bot. The final practices begins with each team ready to take on the other.

Final Preparations Project Presentation Today the team had a run through of the project run through. The run through was watch by one of our physics teachers, she gave use some areas of improvement, which we started to work on straight away as to get it finished before nationals tomorrow. The team also checked all of the runs and they all seemed to be fine, hopefully the robot wont decide to wobble off course like it did in regionals! New Jumpers! Today we also received the Reading School jumpers that we ordered from the RSPA (Reading School Parents Association) along with a complementary  EV3 set. They also took some team photos which will hopefully be posted on their Facebook page.

Colour Coded Attachments This week, the building team have been working on a replica of the front of the black thunder robot. They are doing this because they want to try and use colour sensors and colour coded attachments so that the turn overs between runs is almost seamless. This is something we were trying to do for the regional competition but we decided not to. Contacting for the project We are currently awaiting replies from the people whom we contacted about the project in the previous week. These are: NASA; The European Space Agency and Dr Ruth Bamford at the University of Oxford and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Reversing Polarities The coding team have been testing the different runs and editing the code so that it is more accurate. The main thing they have been working on is reversing the polarities of the motors for 7 different parts of the runs. This is an attempt to made the robot more accurate. Sumo Competition The year 7 and 8's have been con...

Sumo Competition Begins! Improving the Mechanisms The building team has continued improving forward movement, to make it as consistent as possible and so that the robot does not wobble whilst moving. They have also been working on improving the attachments and the mechanisms that connect them to the robot, changing the 4 -toothed gears to ones with more teeth to improve accuracy. Contacts About the Project We have had a reply from Professor Owens, he gave us a contact for Ruth Bamford, who is working on the same idea as us at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory. We then contacted her to ask her about our project idea. We are also working on contacting NASA and the European Space Agency about our idea. Sumo Competition The year sevens and eights have just started to build their robots fro the sumo competition. Some of them have been using some ideas from the Lego website to make their robots even more competitive. They have also been experimenting with different attachmen...

First Session Back Today is our first meeting together since we won the regional competition on Saturday 12/01/19. Today we have been trying to fix the problems that we had with the turning circles and the straight movement. The team is using a trial and improvement method to get the turning values correct so that the turning is much more reliable. The project team has been contacting more scientists about our project idea to gain more ares to improve on. They are currently contacting Matt Owens, who is a professor at Reading University. They are going to try and contact the European Space Agency about our idea as well. Some others I. The team have been looking at videos of previous years nationals to find out how many points we need to aim for. This will help us decide which extra missions we need to add into our runs.

Final Preparations Practicing the Presentation Today we have been practicing for the presentation and making some final adjustments to the order and some speech. All of the other aspects of the competition have been finished and everyone mostly knows their words for the project presentation. The Core Values poster has been printed after some more final edits and the robot and all its attachments are complete. To see our FLL code, please go to https://github.com/rs-blackthunder/fll Sumo Competition After the FLL, we will be running a Lego robotics sumo competition in the Friday club. the area that the bots will fight in is roughly the size of the FLL test board and the robots will fight until one robot is destroyed or cannot move. We also did this last year and receive a lot of positive feedback from club members.  This week members have been starting to build their robots that they will use in the competition and brainstorming what good tactics are and what attachments...

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!

Coding the Robot This week the team have managed to finalize the path and runs that the robot will take in the competition. After this, they have been working out the angles that the bot will need to turn through to use these paths. Additionally, they have been testing the current code for the robot and making the required modifications to the code. This process is taking a fairly long time as they are having to use trial and error to make the turns more accurate.  The Project The project team have been deciding and making notes on two different possible problems to look into with more detail. These are cosmic radiation and the cost of getting into space. They have been looking into some already present ideas to solve these (e.g Reaction Engines) and also brainstorming ones of their own.

FLL The Project Today we made a start on the project. They have been researching about different apps to help counter isolation and pass time. They have also hypothesized different techniques that let them see family and friend back home by using VR or AR technology. Mission Attachments The building team have been theorizing attachments for the robot so that it can complete several of the different challenges successfully. They have also started to create and refine these attachments so the work to maximum efficiency.  Some of the team have also started to write the code for these attachments, they will finish this and start testing it next week.  Robotics club competition All of the year 7 and 8 teams have been given an EV3 Brick and a battery. They were using these to test their code, if any changes needed to be made they will most likely make the necessary changes next week. Most of the groups have almost finished their robots and some have started on attachm...

Building the Robot This week the building team started building the actual robot. they are trying to find the best ways to fit the pieces together to get the most efficient outcome. They have also been watching a video on how all of the mission models need to be used. They are using this knowledge to come up with a concept for the different attachments hat are going to be used on the robot to perform the separate tasks that need to be carried out in the competition. The coding team have been trying to comeup with the preliminary code that the robot is going to use. The year sevens and eights  are continuing with the FLL competition from last year. This week they have started to build their individual robots. They were first split into groups of ten and given some parts to use. They have been told about the different tasks that they will have to perform using these robots, to further help them design and build the robots.