Uni week 2

In the second week we started robotics which was interesting. It was just like lego i used to play with as a kid just now motors and mechanics are thrown into the mix which was good fun. I got put into a team with 3 others, and didn't fully support the ideas they were going with but felt that it was necessary to be a team player and go with there ideas as well and not just my own. I felt that we didn't pro form on the first robotics programing as a group and felt quite let down at our final result. We had to create two robots one which had to move in a similar motion to a chess piece we designed, within a 2 meter box but also avoid other robots in the process. The other had to follow a pre set line to a doorway and either knock or relay a message. The robots we made did work but didn't fulfill requirements and could of been designed better for both briefs.

We are now currently into the 3rd week and have had some new members join our group and feel they have made a valuable contribution. I'm finding myself more and more critical at this point as i wish to produce a good result and find myself maybe being harsh or rash on some team members ideas? But by pulling apart there ideas critically i find that we get rid of the rubbish and get some good strong concepts. We have to design a robot that will interact with the environment, work without any human interference and produce an art work or display on a medium be it 2D or 3D. After much debate our group has gone with a laser light show idea. First concepts for this were sketchy and a motor system i tried to set up using cogs to try and only use one other NXT brain failed. This was because the cogs werent that reliable in the formation i had them because of the lego's design and the motor just couldn't produce enough power to operate the turning devices. So now we are running 3 NXT brains to create a full spectrum of movement. Another snag we ran into was the coloring of the light show. We needed reasonably powerful lasers and assorted colour's but not many were listed on trade me so we ended up with three 50MW green lasers. We thought about how we could change the lights but in the end couldn't figure a way to change its colour. I was also able to get 2 diffraction gratings from my old schools physics department. Using these together i was able to split one of the beams in a vertical direction and then again but in a horizontal direction, creating a interesting pattern.
We test ran a laser with and without diffraction grating's and got some good results.








From the tests we can see that having the light in one position to long gives a white light on the long exposure camera but this could be used for variation of colour.