Robot is snailing to the finish!!

Today we started off making a new chess piece. My group had the Atlas chess piece that projects a wall that other pieces can't get through to make the game harder to play. I liked the design of it because it had a crown of crosses at the top that made it look like a royal piece. Some issues we encountered were adjusting its wall of protection to work with the other pieces and to make sure that the wall didn't make it impossibly hard for the game to move on since each player has ONE Atlas piece. So if they clashed together nobody could move on the board. It's a matter of making your ideas work within a set of boundaries like environment and other components involved, like in this project the qualities of the other normal pieces.




This piece was my absolute favourite from the other groups. I don't like the design so much because I don't think it shows the personality of the piece enough. It's a very fun piece I think because when it takes an enemy piece it adopts that piece's movements for one turn, with the exception of royal pieces. I love how it changes all the time, which can make a chess game more interesting. This one was called the Jester.












This chess piece had my favourite design. It's simple and I think it looks delicious to be honest; reminds me of jello. It's called the Joker and you can tell that from the design because it looks all wobbly and fun to play with.












Personally I despise many things to do with angels, but I liked the idea of this chess piece. I think it was the only "healing" chess piece out of all the groups. Most of the other chess pieces were about interesting ways to kill enemy chess pieces. The idea is that it can be sacrificed to take on the characteristics of a fallen chess piece on your side.





Afterwards we got to program this little robot thing to move/be as similar to the concept of our chess piece as possible.

Building the actual robot was annoying and frustrating to be completely honest XD We didn't have half the pieces required. One thing I worked out from that is if something doesn't work, and it's impossible to make it work, improvise and find a new way to do whatever it was you were trying to do. Since if 1+1=2 and 3-1=2, there are a multitude of ways to get the number 2. Therefore, it doesn't matter what the thing you're trying to obtain is, there are a million ways to get what you want. You just need to find the way.

Programming the robot was annoying too. Partly because even though our sensors were working we couldn't figure out how to get it to move the way we wanted it to. We wanted it to stop and turn if the ultrasonic sensor "sees" something that less that 12inches of its reach, but we never found out how to do that despite tinkering around in the program for several hours. In the end I played with the moving blocks, then figured out how to make it turn. I still couldn't get the sensors working right, but it was moving correctly though. So me and my group came to a compromise and decided that for our first time getting it to move in the right pattern was enough for now, at least we got it to turn. I think this shows how important it is to experiment, and how you get things eventually if you keep on trying.






This is our little robot without its numerous embellishments. When we tried it, it was super slow because of flat batteries. Will bring extra batteries tomorrow.