Racing Robot


THE RACING ROBOT

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Hello! Welcome to our Year 2 project where we have decided to design a Racing Robot car! We have decided to create this project for educational purposes, intending to further engage students when in a learning environment.

This blog will show the process that we followed, along with the challenges we faced when creating this project.  Two days before each lab day, we had meetings with our advisor to help ensure that we are on the right track, and heading to the completion of this project without any issues!

The Aim of the Game:

There are 2 cars that compete with each other. Each player has to answer questions displayed on the screen, and the player with the most correct answer will win! 

For every correct answer, the car will move forward on the track, until they reach the finish line. The winning car will do a victory dance!
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DAY 1

This was the start of the project. We had firstly gone to retrieve our components that we had previously ordered and began to unbox and test all of our components.

We decided to test the motor driver by using some batteries to check if the chassis works as it should. Unfortunately, when we had placed the batteries on the chassis, there was a sudden burning smell coming from the motor driver. We immediately responded by removing the batteries as quickly as possible to ensure safety.

We looked into this carefully and assumed that the motor driver had burned due to the voltage being too high. We decided to then speak to our advisor to see what our next steps can be, who then advised that it is best to purchase another motor driver while we still have time.

We had used a larger battery pack, which produced more voltage than we initially planned. When this was supplied to the motor driver, the motor driver had burned. We noticed this after plugging the voltage source into the Multi-Meter to find out the voltage that this was supplying.

Below is an image of us checking to see if the Arduino chip works as expected, by plugging it into the Multi-Meter and varying voltage slightly between 0 and 6V.


Finally, we had re-ordered a motor driver and battery pack, hoping that the following week will be more successful!

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DAY 4

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DAY 4 Today our objectives were: - To refine the code and ensure that it works as expected. - To add another car. We started off by adding more questions to the app. This was to make the game a lot more realistic. We decided to add 10 questions so that the game is not too long, and not too short. Previously we had used 3 questions to ensure that the app and car were working as expected and that the transition between questions is as expected. Some of us worked on creating and finishing the poster today, whilst the rest of us attempted to try and program a victory dance to the car to add a bit more to the project. So far, everything is going as expected! After this has been done, we just need to finally replicate this onto another car, so that there are 2 cars. This will make the game a lot more competitive and more fun as a whole. Below is the final product. If there is one thing that we would improve on if we had more time is to add more of a variety of questions, rather than just mat...
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