ECOBOT
An Animated Landscape
Created by Adrian Bockian '09 and Alex French '11 for Robotic Design Studio (PHYS/CS 115), Wintersession 2009.
Exhibition
EcoBot's debut
We presented EcoBot at the Robotic Design Studio Exhibition at Wellesley College on Monday, January 26, 2009.
When we first began testing everything out on EcoBot, the light sensor connected to the HandyBoard and placed beneath the factory was not detecting changing light conditions. We cut a larger hole in the landscape to allow more light to reach the sensor, and then the industry station ran successfully. The time intervals for the deer track were a little off; by the end of the exhibition, the deer was no longer returning to the exact same spot it began on the track. Luckily, we were able to manually turn the gears from our open end of the box to correct this a little bit. People really seemed to enjoy the industry station.
The waste station functioned properly as well but created a less dramatic effect than the industry station. We used Adrian's cell phone as the waste, hoping it would be heavy enough to activate the touch sensor in the trash bin. This touch sensor was difficult to activate, and the cell phone had to be placed in the trash bin with a firm hand and at a certain angle. The trees did successfully lower and fall, but some of the children moved the trees manually and this may have affected the trees' functioning. Nonetheless, the concept behind the waste station, recycling in order to save trees, seemed familiar to the kids.
As for the sound effects, they played softly and went unnoticed by the loud crowd. Next time, we would like to attach speakers to Adrian's laptop so people can hear the sounds because they're really cool!
The energy station caused the biggest problem, and we never got it working during the Exhibition. Alex had gotten the rotator to work fine by pressing the start button on the handyboard, but at the time we did not have the led light we hoped to use to trigger the rotator's action. When we finally got a bulb and hooked it up, along with two touch sensors (one for the light switch and one for choosing renewable energy), we had to test the energy code in a hurry. The code we had written needed a lot of editing for the handyboard to accept it. We finally got the handyboard to download the code, but the program never got past the oil rig drilling; it seemed that the renewable energy switch was not working. Even when we replaced it with several other touch sensors, nothing changed. We tried manually starting and stopping the program and turning the handyboard off and on, but the program always got stuck on the oil rig drilling and never responded to the renewable energy switch. According to our code, the windmill should only have run as long as we held down the renewable energy switch, so pressing the switch only once would not have given the windmill a chance to operate, but pressing the switch at all should still have caused the oil rig to stop drilling and the rotator to rotate to the windmill. We tried a different port and had the same problem, so we think the problem is switch-related, somehow. We had to turn the handyboard off and leave the energy station alone after a few tries because the rotator kept turning more and more in the same direction, well past where it needed to be for the oil rig to be in place. There was no way to make it turn the other way, and the wires were overextended and beginning to get caught, so we had to stop the program and leave the energy station alone.
We wish we had had time to use our mountain diorama kit to make the landscape look more realistic. In the initial planning stages, we had a vision of a very realistic-looking model park scene, with a mountain, hiking paths and hikers, running water, and lots of grass and trees. There was simply not enough time. Making EcoBot as realistic and scientifically accurate as possible could be a good semester or long-term project. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to enjoy EcoBot and understand its message easily, so EcoBot served its main purpose!