Category LEGO MINDSTORMS

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Teacher's notes: Introduction to the lesson

The teacher should first explain the mission to the students: the robot should start from the base, marked in advance, to reach the next line, where the Moon is marked, to go round the Moon and return to the base.
Then the teacher should remind students that they have to accomplish the mission in small steps. Discuss with them what these steps might be.Students’ first task will be to accomplish the mission in which they have a starting and a final point set by the teacher. They should do that by trial and error until they find the correct settings of the robot. It all comes to trying out various settings for power and duration.
The same applies to setting the turn. Students will have to test both the angle and the duration of the turn.
Students should be careful about the sequence of the actions and, most importantly, should find a working solution on their own.
The teacher could make the task more complex: When the robot reaches the dark side of the Moon, it stops, makes a sound resembling the sound from a camera flash and then returns home.
The robot is horizontal. "I took the risk and it turned out great – I put a camera in the self-timer mode on top of the robot. At the start of the program I set a two-second delay, so that we could start the robot and install the camera on top". (Alex)
The teacher should tell students how robots turn in advance. He comments on programming the turn. The most obvious way is to use the tank block. The teacher should also focus on the steering block. You can also use the pictures in the m2 section.
For this lesson you will need a field, with some sort of marking for the Moon. This could be a pile of tires or a ball fixed to the floor somehow. You will also need to mark the pozition of the Earth where the robot will take off from. It could be a line of duct tape or a spacing between two floor tiles

#874
09 May 2018

Image for Calculated read of calibrated value for Light/Color LEGO Mindstorms sensors

6:14

Calculated read of calibrated value for Light/Color LEGO Mindstorms sensors

Following the Advanced Sensor Calibration course section, it is time to extract the logic for getting a calibrated value into a new block. This block will have an input and on this input, we give the port number. The block will return the calibrated value for this port number. We've built all the other blocks only because of this almost final video here.

#646
04 Oct 2017

Space Walk Emergency. Mission 07 For FIRST LEGO League 2018 Into Orbit Challenge

Background

Space is quiet and beautiful, but with almost no heat, air, nor air pressure, it could freeze, suffocate, and boil you all at once! Help our spacewalking astronaut “Gerhard” get to safety.

Mission

The robot needs to get Gerhard’s body into the airlock chamber.

Scores

Astronaut completely in the habitation hub’s airlock chamber: 22 OR
Astronaut partly in the habitation hub’s airlock chamber: 18
Possible scores: 0, 18, 22

Scoring Requirements

For this mission, the word “body” includes all parts except the loop.
Results must be visible at the end of the match.

(mission descriptions source https://www.first-lego-league.org/)

#542
01 Jan 2016

MyBlock for controlling the Medium Motor by position - port A

Using the On for degrees (rotations) option of the the Medium Motor Move Block you program the motor to rotate for the given number of degrees. However, sometimes is useful to program the motor to go to a given position, instead. To achieve that you can use this block. It takes the start position of the motor as 0 degrees. Then when you run the block with given number of degrees it just rotates the motor to that position. For exaple if your current position is -20 degrees and you run the block with 30 degrees, the motor will rotate for 50 degrees. But if your current position is 10 degrees the same program will rotate the motor for 20 degrees.