Week 7 - Mindstorm

After have around 2 weeks of delay with and trying to get the lego mindstorm. I got tired of waiting and got one of my housemates to actually bring the RCX module(programming brick) and user guides and stuff.

Ok finally looking at the mindstorm sutff, we have a rough idea of what we're going to build, basically a robot with follows a light source and moves around objects when it knocks into things. Now here is the tricky part.

Building
Well, the idea is not only just a robot that follows a path, cause that would be just re-using technology and we really want to develop something new. So while looking through the lego building guide, we saw several design which we could combine and the functions as well, proberly a robot with a light sensor in the front, and some touch sensors at the side for bumpers to detect it knocking into object.
We also saw that the wheels can be customised to have tracks like the original design to adapte for different flooring (e.g. carpet, concret, wooden..etc)

Programming
This would be the tricky part and I do forsee this being most of my part. Now lego does have pree written programs that allows the robot to move forward, reverse when it knocks into something, and another program that makes it either follow light or move away from light or even to follow a set path.
Here is the problem, they don't have an integrated program that does all the above function together, and unfortuantely thats what we need, a program that allow it to follow path or light and if there is something blocking it, it would know how to aviod it. This would be more real in a sense and it make it more useful, rather than having something that is dumb enough not to move around objects as it would serve the webcam must puspose if the view is being blocked.
So, how are we going to go about doing this, the answer, mindstorms has an additional "plug-in" to its software, which allows you to re-write the program functions using Visual Basics (WOW).
Well, the worse case would be to ask for help on the lego mindstorm forums as well, but yah
I guess I'll try things out on my own first, and if that the worse case, the forums would be my next life line.

So far thats as much as we can do with out the full set of lego, I just hope it comes in this week so I can work on it during the holidays.