By next competition, we hope to have a more accurate way of measuring the distance that Monty has traveled. This past competition, the only distance measurements we relied upon were those made by GPS; Although the calculations proved reliable to a certain extent, there is a lot of room for…
In Robomagellan, we joke that our successes and failures are defined by Freddie Mercury moments or Picard face palm moments. A Picard moment would be like saying “Why aren’t we getting camera data?” and then 5 minutes later realizing the camera is unplugged. A rare Freddie moment occurs after a…
We are all incredibly diverse here at PVIT (no, really!). In Robomagellan alone we have students in seemingly all of the activities PVHS has to offer. We have percussionists, saxophonists, varsity lacrosse players, runners, editors from Live from 205 (our school news program), tennis players, laser enthusiasts (with two functional eyes!),…
It is now possible to count on one hand the months we have left until competition. At this time, we enter panic mode. Lucky for us, panic mode isn’t the only mode we will be using. We are going to tackle the programming of the robot with a modular structure, using…
Our sensor setup last year was sorely lacking. We had one sonar sensor mounted in the front, a few vex touch sensors, and a non-functioning camera. We had a random algorithm for obstacle avoidance that sometimes led us into corners and walls. This year we plan to have a more effective sensor…
Last year we had a big problem with our chosen camera, a specialized robotics camera made by Carnegie Mellon University. We could never get it to work outside, no matter the weather conditions. This year has barely started and we already have a fully functioning camera that can identify cones indoors and…
