r/FLL

Years ago I was mentoring an FRC team when I asked one of the students why there were no new kids joining. He said no one was studying robotics in the middle school. I thought about that and decided they must be scared or intimidated by doing robots. Afraid they might break something expensive or hurt someone like the car-making robots. Or that they wouldn't understand and look like an idiot. That you have to have a PHD, work for a robotics company, or be a rocket scientist to work on robots. I am some of all three, plus an FRC mentor, so I decided to come up with a less scary, less intimidating robot. One with a VERY open platform so you can see all the parts. Breadboards pad-per-hole and solderless to add semi-permanent parts and any circuit/ components you want, room to drill holes to mount new things like IR object detection, lever switches, ultrasonic for mazes, ultrasonic detectors for range finding, servos, utlrasonic on servo for room mapping, accel/gyro/mag sensor, clock, 11 plus 16 channel PWM, place to mount 5 axis robotic arm, any sensor(s) you can interface. All connected to an Arduino Due. I am still building my prototype (my fourth version), documenting the build to make step by step construction guide, shopping list for per robot, per 10 pack of robots, per school tools and test equipment. Student instruction guide for over 30 Lesson Plans with history/over view, Theory of operation, Hypotheses to support Theories, Experiments to support Hypotheses, work from simplest to most advance and end with hints of more experiments and search phrases to learn more on your own. Teachers Guide. How to test a robot that might be broken. How to repair a broken one. Or just back to Build Your Own. Currently it looks like a it over $200 US from Amazon for most items, $120 each in batches of 10, or about half that from Alibaba. I think it was down to $75 each in batches of 10 from Alibaba. Plus my own little Manifesto. When I am done, if there is any interest, giving out all files freely to any who wants them, maybe post on Zenodo as well.

Mike

I’ve heard a lot of things about how the partnership between First and Lego is ending, and so is FLL with it.

Hi everyone,
My friends and I made a small free site called Gears and Models where we share LEGO FLL models, gear builds, Studio.io files, and other things we’ve been working on.

We started it because we wanted an easy place to keep and share ideas with other teams and LEGO fans. Maybe some of the models or mechanisms can help someone with their own project too.

Everything is free, and we’re still adding more stuff as we go. Would be cool to hear what people think :)
link here https://www.gearsandmodels.orgo

VEX just announced its separation from RECF, its partner for greater than 20 years. RECF similar to FIRST has announced it will continue to carry on and teams can use VEX plus other materials as they see fit. The robotics world is changing so quickly and to be honest I wish I wasn’t here to see it. Makes me yearn for simpler days. And of course, FTC and FRC are undergoing some major controversial hardware changes.

I am working with the LEGO SPIKE ultrasonic distance sensor and I am running into an issue. The sensor behaves inconsistently depending on the lighting conditions — sometimes it detects an object at a certain distance, and sometimes it completely misses it, even though the object and the distance stay the same. More over sometimes one sensor detects the object while the other misses it. On the next attempt, the first sensor detects the object while the other misses it.

I have read through the technical specifications from LEGO, but I still do not fully understand what the sensor is actually measuring and why lighting would affect it. As far as I know, ultrasonic sensors should not be affected by light at all.

Has anyone experienced this before? What could cause this behaviour, and how can I make the detection more reliable?