CHALLENGE 4: LINEFIE

 

THE MORTAL ROBOT RACE CHALLENGE

In this challenge the robots have to follow a black line and go through a circuit drawn by said line.

The teacher told us that we can't be exactly ON the line, we have to be next to the line but really really near to it, as that, we'll take less time to go through the circuit.

We've only done a velocity chalelenge before, and it didn't go well, but we hope to be the quickest runners in this one.

Our robot must have 2 big motors.

We're positive about this new challenge,however, we still have our doubts about Alfie, because the past speed challenge went horribly.😡😠

13/12

In this challenge, we have to completely rebuild Alfie, more than half of the pieces it had aren't necessary for a velocity challenge. Besides, the additional pieces would slow down the robot, so we need to keep Alfie as simple as possible.

We've taken off all the unnecessary pieces and added little pieces to make it as stable as possible.

The robot has changed entirely, so we renamed it as we do in every challenge we have, this time, its name is Linefie, because it has to follow a line.

We're so creative😎.

15/12

We've started to make the program for the robot, we want to have more than one program in case the program we choose goes wrong.

These two are photos of our program currently, we hope we don't have to make many changes 😅

We have to use this in order to create a program that works.

We also changed the wheels, because the other ones were not as quick as we wanted them to be, and remember, this is a speed challenge.

20/12

We tested our program, and turns out, it went really, really wrong.

With that awful and ununderstandable program, our robot started to spin and completely ignored the black line, and the challenge is about following it.

This weird program was a total failure.

So, we had to make another one, or totally change it.

We started to make another one, and so far, it's easier and better than the other one.

10/01/2022

We are back again!!!!!!!!!!!! And stronger than ever. We started the new year with energy and will for work. We feel powerful, amazing, and we know what that feeling means...

BINGO! We are totally winning this! Well, maybe we are not, we just wanted to wish everyone a happy 2022!YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

And a special one for our lovely teachers.

Today, we didn't do a lot, but we fixed some little building mistakes and started to fix the program.We also wrote an essay individually, which was about the challenge. We have also made more essays in other sessions, all these were about pieces and robotics concepts and more stuff, we've made a lot.

12/01

Today was kind of hard.

Difficult to explain and handle.

People are a little disgusting sometimes, well that is arguable. 

We are going to tell you today's not so funny story.

When we got to our robotics class, we didn't look at our Linefie, since we wanted to focus on our program more than the construction, as it's already finished.

So, when we properly grabbed our robot and got it out from the locker where we keep all of them, we realised one thing.

It didn't have its crazy wheel.

Context:the crazy wheel is ESSENTIAL to our robot, to all the versions of Alfie, and now, it "magically" disappeared. Because the wheel gets attached to our robot well, it can't fall accidentally, it only comes off when it gets pulled strongly. And also, it can't get lost so casually.

The thing is, all the times we had to build the crazy wheel ourselves, our robot went terribly wrong, so with our crazy wheel lost, we aren't hopefull at all.

However, as we don't have a wheel, we had to build one orselves, and we looked some building ideas up on the internet.

In the end, we built this wheel.

It works well, we're satisfied with it so far.

14/01

Today was super productive. Seriously, more than any day of this year, we built a brand new crazy wheel that works really efficiently.

We are very proud of our work today, as we rebuilt our crazy wheel from 0, without the piece that everyone has, and it works well!!!!!!

We also mastered our program, which now works perfectly and enables our robot to do all the curves of the circuit.

Speaking about work and productiveness, today as easily our best day this year.

Next day, we'll try out if our robot can be a bit faster ans ensure our win.

This is our amazing wheel, we can't be prouder.

17/01

The day has come!
We can finally say that Linefie is our little champion.
Today was the challenge day and all of the teams had to clash the circuit. Racefie was the first robot ready to prove its bravery (as always), it has done the circuit perfectly two out of three times, and in the testing round it has nailed it too.

In this video, we're showing you Linefie's testing round

Its best timing mark was of 1 minute and 0.2 seconds, it wasn't the fastest one, but almost.

Certainly, what has given us the victory was our precision following the line, and not the timing. But sometimes you have to give more emphasis to the skills than the speed, quite a life metaphor.

Here we have a picture of the amazing program we used, it's different from the others, but it's way more effective.

It was also one of the reasons why we won.

Returning to our robot, what has helped us too was the size of the wheels, we chose ones a little bit smaller because of the crazy wheel, and that helped us not to fall to the ground (you can appreciate it on the video).

Days like this give us the inspiration and motivation that we need to keep going. We can't be any prouder of what we have achieved with all of the walls that we have got to destroy (for example, the infamous crazy wheel loss).
We hope to just go better from what we achieved today, and we promise to make it working hard and enjoying the ride (it's a joke because Linefie rides thanks to its crazy wheel😜) !!

Poor little Linefie, his battery was running out, that's why he has an orange light in the second picture and the video, we charged it once the challenge was finished, and, currently, it's fine!!!!

We ocasionally have to charge the EV3 block, but we almost never do it.😓😓😓

See you in the next challenge!!!! Full of hope and motivation!😉😎