Photos from the FLL 2010 Competition

I've put together some of the photos I took from when I went along to last year's competition.

You'll see teams answering technical questions, the two competition tables put together, lots of fabulous project displays, and some photos with two teams competing at the tables. Obviously there are no photos of the presentations or team challenges because they were held privately in a separate room.

Hopefully this will give you some idea of what you'll see at the competition (I'll show you it again at school where the pictures might be clearer directly from my laptop).

Tip for all teams from Jason - using MyBlocks for a Master program

Often as teams become more experienced and able to do more missions the 2.5
minutes runs out too quickly and saving time by whatever means possible is
very important. One mechanism for doing this is by using a master program
instead of manually starting each program with several potentially error
prone button presses.

A master program is usually made by first taking all the robot run programs
and making a MyBlock for each one then assembling all the MyBlocks together
with a wait for button press between them. This means you actually have 1
program on the NXT and because each block is reusable code (i.e. once you've
used a move block once in a program it doesn't need to store the entire
block's code, again just a parameter list) so memory footprint is reduced.
It's not often an FLL team will run out of NXT memory if graphics and sounds
have been avoided. There are some issues with master programs especially
when may re-order your robot runs on the fly for various reasons. There is a
full treatment of this in
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Winning-Design-James-Jeffrey-Trobaugh/978143
0229643

Sometimes I recommend teams hit the "Delete All" button then download only
what they need, that way untitled-1 thru untitled-8 (which no one even
remembers what they actually do!) are gone as well and only your carefully
named FLL robot run programs will be downloaded.

Best Regards,

Jason Kyle, Kiwi FIRST

Team Meeting - 27 October

Today we had a disscusion about what we would do for our project and inovation. We also disscused team commitment and self responsability. For the next few weeks we will have class time to do our work in. Some of the things we worked on today are
Annabelle: Worked on the brochure for our out reach part of our inquiry.
Freddie: Looked for a name for the robot and worked on his program.
Jake: Upgraded the robot with stronger wheels.
Ethan: Improved his program for the rat run.
Alice: Got close to completing her program for the bacteria run.
Oliver: Completed his program for the fish with good results then got started on the pizza & ice cream.
Overall we had a good time

By Jake

Team Meeting - Tuesday 18 October

Today we had another robotics session at school. Four of us programed Oliver,Ethan,Jack and Alice. Annabelle made some finnishing touches to her pamphlet and Jasmine started her flow chart. Oliver tryed to get the robot to a refrigerated trailer and pulled it back to base and now is starting on collecting the fish. Ethan tried a new way of getting to the import export but he is still trying to collect the rat. Jack is trying to collect the corn from the havester and collecting the farm truck and taking it back to base. Alice got to the green bacteria and is now trying to get it back to base.

Jack

We also had a great audio-conference (via speakerphone) with Anthony Klinac of Shockwatch New Zealand Limited in Auckland. He imports several different temperature-checking products and is going to send us some to look at, free of charge. Isn't he amazing! He has already emailed some information to Carol to pass on (see below - Carol will have the pamphlets he included, for you at school next week). Here are Carol's notes. And below that is Anthony's email.

Hello Carol and Children

Thanks for your call today.

As discussed this afternoon. I have attached relative information an our WarmMark and Temp Mark 8 Products.

I currently have Samples of

8
10
20
25
37 Deg C Tags I can send you down.

Just let me know if you require any more information and I will see What I can do

Kind Regards and keep up the good work


Anthony Klinac
Shockwatch New Zealand Limited
AUCKLAND
T: 09 298 1221
M: 021 762 010
Skype: anthonyonskype1
sales@shockwatch.co.nz
www.shockwatch.co.nz

Robot names?

Our team name is 'Nanobots'. We still need to come up with a name for the robot. It needs to be sensible and clever, not something silly or embarrassing, because it is representing our school. Our robot's name for RoboCup was Zeus.

At our last meeting ideas offered suggested we needed something relating to 'innovation' because this was what FLL was about (with the project solution), or names with the words 'micro' or 'bot' or 'chip'.

A quick look online suggests other people have similar problems coming up with names for robots:

Robot names from TV and other media

What are some names for robots?

The Periodic Table of Elements has some names that may be suitable for a robot

We'll talk about this some more...

Team Meeting - Friday 14 October

We were completely focused on programming, this is what we did, Annabelle was working on reasons of the bacteria in chicken and how you can get sick. Freddie and Oliver have copied a robot. Jack was trying to design a bucket while he was doing his harvester run to grab the truck and get it back to base. Fish were being a problem for Alice on the bacteria. Ethan was programming good but, the rat on the import-export wasn’t sliding properly.

BY ETHAN

Annabelle working on a Brochure for our Outreach: Dangers/Did you know? And advice for consumers of chicken.

We had forgotten to add the Fish Mission to the list on the board.

Freddie is building a second identical robot to practise with, rather than having two different ones.

We started thinking about a name for the robot. Reminder that the team name is Nanobots.

Carol showed us QR codes.

Team Meeting - Tuesday 11 October

Today we were working on putting the missions in order of the ones that we are going to get done first, such as removing items that get in the way of the the robot when it is doing other tasks, and grouping missions that the robot can attempt at the same time.

We made a phone call to Catherine at Tegel and Annabelle asked her questions about chicken contamination.

Ethan was having problems finding his rat slides program. He was also finding it hard to get the robot to hit the trigger in the right place.

Freddie couldn't get his tipper to tip the groceries on the table, but it can fit all the groceries on easily.

We have decided not to bother collecting the red and purple bacteria or putting the bacteria in the sink.

Jake was having trouble turning the robot without crashing into the mission models.

Jack is adapting his harvester program because he discovered he can't turn around by the harvester without crashing into the fence.

I have nearly finished my refrigerated trailer program but I still have to work on fine tuning the accuracy.

By Oliver

Carol took notes during the phone interview.
Annabelle has started to think about what should go in a brochure we could make to hand out to people about chicken safety.
Carol would like every student to know when there are blog updates and keep up to date - they usually rely on parents to let them know via their email subscription.

Team Meeting - Thursday 6 October

Ethan had the robot pushing the Pest Control lever, but the mouse kept getting stuck. He began to solve this by making the robot approach the lever faster. Annabelle designed some questions for Tegel and made a phone call to them, as we wanted to know how they monitored the temperature of their chickens.

Meanwhile, Jake was having lots of problems with turning the robot. He realised that this occurred because he programmed it to turn too softly. Caitlyn was helping Ethan with his project, and needs to get the thank you card for New World done. Jack had made no progress, as he had problems with programming the robot accurately and reliably, and I had completed the Groceries Challenge. Alice had successfully emptied all the bacteria dispensers.

By Freddie

Food Factor® Robot Game video - Produced by FLL®

Robot Game designer and Engineer, Scott Evans, describes the Food Factor Robot Game.

Team Meeting - Wednesday 5 October

The robotics team is going to have a practice over the holidays. We are going to get help by a professor.

Annabel is writing question to tegal when we ring them.

Oliver is making motors for the robot.

Alice and Jake are working on attachments for the robot.

Ethan is working on the import-export for the fll completion.

Jack is working on the harvester for the fll completion.

Freddie is working on the attachments on the groceries.

By Caitlyn