Light bot- Overview

12/3/2010

Today we started on the concepts of our project. Writing down a list a requirements gave us focus and goals to achieve. Heading in that direction one of the first ideas was a robot that used different materials to produce different results on paper but was then discarded because of its lack of originality. We had ideas of using glow in the dark paint, felt pens, chalk, pastel, acrylics or lasers but the group majority voted on lasers and that idea was selected. The laser idea came from Yuta. Chris .B who saw my design which I had created on Photoshop thought it cool to recreate something along those lines.

Computer Generated Image:

This inspire our group to try a replication of this except in not quite an intricate scale. We thought we could capture this by using long exposure setting on a camera. We also had to make it interact with the environment and therefore came up with the idea of blue tooth between the to NXT systems.

15/3/2010

After having a weekend to look at the program and think about the idea we came back and started on building the robots. Chris .B and I started on building on the interactive robot that would send messages to the light projecting robot. We finished this within a few hours while the rest of the group worked on trying to design a rig for the lasers. By the end of the day the interactive robot was done and only ideas had been created for the laser robot.

16/3/2010

With the entire team working on the robot we quickly came up with ideas on how to operate the lasers. Yuta and Sahill designed a rig using the lego pieces, it had a strong based except a basic flaw all the lasers would move in the same horizontal direction with the same distance constantly as all the lasers were hooked up to one turn table and sat in fixed posistions. I came up with the idea of trying to only use one NXT Brain per robot to make thingsa little less complex. Yuta managed to score three 50W green lasers on trade me for $100 and we all chipped in for them. After taking some of the components home I was able to build a simplistic rig for mounting the lasers. When I was confronted with the issue of making the lasers move in the horizontal and vertical plane of movement with only three motors. I had the idea of using gears to move the lasers in a horizontal motion whilst it moved vertically. In theory it would of worked except there were complications, the gears weren't designed well enough to rotate one another at 90 degree angles and the center motor didn't seem to have the strength to move vertically, rotate the gears so it went horizontally and also power thehorizontal movement or the other lights either side. The next day we scrapped this idea and decided to go with 2 NXT brains on the laser rig.

17/3/2010

After Modifying the rig we were just waiting on the programing for the robots. While Chris .B was working on that I asked Seb from another group if we could borrow his camera to test the long exposure with the green lasers to get an idea on how fast we could move them and what results it would produce. Setting up in the dark room we got some different result by varying our speed and using diffraction gratings.

Results -->

18/3/2010

Chris .B was concentrated deep on finishing the program to make our interactive robot send via bluetooth messages to the laser bot to create the light show. After testing it we found that the program didn't work properly. So we had to quickly switch ideas before the deadline, this involved quickly attaching sound sensors to the rig and to the NXT's. After quickly writing a new program for the sound sensors we found that it worked and produced some pleasing results. That night we set up in the AUT tower's stairwell and got some good shots with the long exposure camera while using Yuta's Amp to generate sound.

Here are our some of final results: