Electricity/robots
Oh no! Robots are taking over the world!! That's right, about a month ago our teacher introduced us to circuits and electronics. We started our basic with a 1.5v battery, wire, and a light bulb. We first learned about how to connect and complete a circuit by connecting to the positives and negatives. Negatively charged electrons flow out of the negative side of the battery and connect with the positively charged electrons at the positive side of the battery, but you must have a LED or a resistor in the circuit otherwise if power keeps running straight directly to the battery without a resistor, it creates a short circuit. Next we learned about voltage and current. Voltage is the amount of potential energy between two points and current is the amount of energy or power released through a battery or an A/C outlet. D/C is used for batteries and A/C is used in electrical outlets and power plants. It started out easy with just light bulbs then our teacher introduced to us a breadboard. A breadboard is a board with columns and rows of conductive material. The rows all connect across horizontally and the columns connect vertically. All of which has holes that connect to the conductive material to create experiments as such.
Now we have gone passed just making a light bulb light up, it is now time for us to be introduced to resistors, capacitors, potentiometers transistors, and LED's. First LED stands for Light Emitting Diode, it acts like a small light it lights up when current is passed through it. Next came the resistor, this little guy reduces the amount of voltage coming through a certain point. There is an in depth color code to define the resistance of a resistor, the resistance of a resistor is measured in ohms. Potentiometers and resistors are very similar in their jobs, potentiometers act like a controllable resistor varying from about 1 ohm to about 10k ohm depending on the type of potentiometer you have. Have you ever seen a flashing LED before? Yes I though so, the flashing LED action is a result of the combination of capacitors and transistors. A capacitor charges and stores energy and releases it in a sudden burst, this is what causes the flashing LED to flash. The transistor acts like an automatic switch, as electrons get closer together, they can jump and create a temporary bridge to complete circuit. If you add a potentiometer in front of the flashing LED, you can control how fast the LED flashes by controlling the amount of voltage, lower voltage=slower flash, higher voltage=faster flash. You think you know everything about electronics? Think again.........
If you thought circuits were hard, its gets harder. We were told our main part of this project is to build and program a working robot that would move and have flashing LED's. We used a program called Python from the folks at codecademy. Python takes you through a 13 hour tutorial on how to write scripts and program. I have a little more experience with programing since I use programing programs at my home on my computer. In the end, we will be building and using the raspberry pi circuit board, we will be using 2. The main raspberry pi board is basically a standard computer that we will be using to program the second raspberry board, the raspi-robot board. The raspi-robot board will be in control of the robot, but first we have to put the boards together. For this we used a method called soldering which is like welding for electronics. Once the boards are soldered and ready, we will be wiring them up to the raspberry pi computer and from there we will program the robot to do whatever we tell it to do.
What you see here is the completed and soldered raspberry pi and raspi-robot assembled ready to be programed. All of what we learned has come to this moment to where we get to show off our fancy creatures from the future. The raspi-robot consists of a 6v input followed by 4 plug in connectors for motors, etc.., then comes the 2 long black programmable micro IC chips. These chips act like a mini computer sending out commands to other components of the device therefore controlling the robot independently.
Concepts:
Syntax error - when a character or string is improperly placed in an instruction and the command fails to be executed.
Variable - a storage location or symbol that contains and unknown value.
Iteration - repeating a procedure in the code.
Raspberry Pi - a single board computer designed in the UK to teach students basic computer science.
SD Card - a Secure Digital Card is a minute memory card used to create storage portable with various devices.
Circuit - a completed loop made of conductors including a power source (battery).
Conductors - material that transmits heat, electricity, or sound.
Current - amount of electric flow or energy.
Voltage - potential energy difference between two points Resistors - device designed to have resistance against travel of electric current.
Ohm's Law - Voltage = Current x Resistance (V = IR)
Kirchoff's First Rule - the total current out of a node equals the total current into a node.
Potentiometer - a three-terminal resistor that can be adjusted to the needed resistance.
Capacitor - device that can store electric charge and discharges with a burst of electrical current
LED - light emitting diode
Reflection:
Here is the almost complete robot ready for action. Unfortunately the school year is rapidly ending faster than we anticipated and we could not have a presentation to show off our robots for all of you but even though we didn't have a presentation it was very fun and challenging for us. I had a lot of fun experimenting with the raspberry pi's and breadboards, I thought that it was magnificent for us as freshmen to be working with such intense electronics. I loved working with the group including Logan Sheehan and Poh Maga. The only very challenging part of this project was the programming, I could have payed more attention to what I was doing rather than just going through the motions.
This freshmen year has been the best year of school for me so far, I have never been so involved with such a great program such as STEM. I just want to thank you all for supporting our projects and achievements this year and we hope to see you next year!!
Thank you!
This freshmen year has been the best year of school for me so far, I have never been so involved with such a great program such as STEM. I just want to thank you all for supporting our projects and achievements this year and we hope to see you next year!!
Thank you!