Lunar Landroids

It has been an eventful two weeks with two major setbacks!

First we designed and built a masterpiece claw robot complete with EOPD, compass and ultra-sound sensors paired with an IR-transmitter, power function motors and a battery pack.  This robot can pick up loops in any placement.

Then our team had to make a heart wrenching decision to disassembled the claw robot for a better balance between function and feasibility, mainly considered the time constraint and maneuverability. The result was more redesigning, rebuilding, and reprogramming for a simpler robot.

The new robot was working nicely collecting 5 to 7 loops, going over the ridge, taking on-board videos and come back to base.

On Friday evening, we found out that the latest Moonbots Q&A prohibited the use of playfield edge as a navigation aide, so we rewrote the program to comply.

As we refined the code and added safety precautions, the code became too big for the NXT-G compiler to compile.  The program crashed on Friday night.  The next debate was, should we switch to another program like LabView which we never used before?

Thankfully, LabView gave us a copy of the LabView 2009 Evaluation DVD to try and helped us installed it on Saturday 8/14/10.

However, while installing LabView, we accidentally wiped out NXT-G v2.0. That night, while trying to reinstall NXT-G v2.0, I did not back up the programs to the server properly and lost all of the Moonbots programs.  The last automatic backup I had was from 4 days ago, without all of the latest MyBlocks and code.

So now I have to be proficient with LabView to rewrite all of the Moonbots program in one week. These two major setbacks (rebuild and lost programs) in the last 2 weeks have been the low points of our Moonbots season.  If we can pull this off and make our deadline, it will be amazing!