Well it is the end of the school year here at GHCA and we have not quite finished with the robot, but we will be having a club next year that can finish it. it has been along year with ups and downs and we look forward to visiting this project again next year. until then farwell ps. you can visit our school site to learn more about our school {the site is} GHCA.COM Good bye

Last class before our vacation, We used Python to run a simulator. The simulator we used came from our own individual designs of the second floor by using The Gimp.Then we uploaded the our second floors in our python program. Our goal for the class was to bring Sentry Bot from one classroom to our Math teachers classroom and back. by doing this, we typed in text such as robot.move(100). that would tell the robot in the simulator to move forward 100 paces. and to turn, we would type in robot.turn(-5). this obviously allowed the robot simulator to turn clockwise. using these two familiar inputs, we were able to controll the robots movement.

Today we moved the 2 of the 4 resistors to a new spot for easier soldering in the long run and we also learned more on how to and not to solder let me give you a example. For example you can not hold the solder above the wire you are soldering that is bombing the circuit with solder,also not to sculpt the solder joint,and the soldering gun always leaves before the solder.well class just ended so i have to go now but we will keep you posted. ---Matt Lincoln---

Last week we worked on soldering the socket that contained our opto-isolater and we also added some current limiting resistors and we also learned how to solder in very tight sapces and the importance of what could happen if we messed up. -MJL

There has been a big change with the scheduling of work on two separate robots. I've found that as a teacher, I was stretched too thin trying to supervise two separate teams of young students at the same time. Issues of maturity and safety prompted me to initiate a rotating schedule, so each week we have just one team working on the robot while the other team works on their website and blog. While it seems like this will slow things down a bit, now that each team has my dedicated focus to guide and help, they are more productive with the time they have.

Recent work on the sentry bot has included the programming of the steering system, enabling WIFI for wireless remote access, and prototyping the sonar to the parallel port. Regarding steering, it works! However, it seems a bit too "jerky". One mistake we made in the original design was to use relays to control the steering motor. A relay is fine for a motor that is on or off for a relatively long period of time, but for a motor that is on and off in multiple directions very quickly, the relays add a lot of noise and delay. I'm sure we're pushing those contacts pretty hard, too. If we have time, we'll replace the steering relays with a solid-state H-bridge.

The wireless networking is done using a cheap USB WIFI adapter. I had to install NDISWRAPPER to get it to work, but now we have untethered control of the robot!

We are currently working on connecting the sonar, which lights LEDs (it was originally meant to help people park their car by using green, yellow, and red lights) to the parallel port status pins. This is done using an optoisolator. We'll be soldering this circuitry to the controller board this week.

The students have struggled using this site to upload their pictures. I'll try to give them a hand so you can see their progress.