Clifford goes to Treasure Island

Design Journal

January
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January 26

Working on Clifford:

We came in a little early to work on our project more before the exhibition. And it’s a good thing we did, because our handyboard was acting up again. We reset it, and talked to Professor Berg about it. He looked over our code and found two potential problems. One was that we were trying to call the search method recursively, which doesn’t necessarily work in handylogo. The other problem was the amount of concurrency we had in our code. Since we had wanted the robot to be moving around, searching randomly, and still paying attention to it’s bumper, we had a lot of “when” statements. Professor Berg helped us come up with a way to write the code that was much simpler and used less concurrency. We switched to this way, and after several small adjustments, the car was working again and the handyboard was happy. We worked some on the poster for the project, and then took a break for lunch.

After lunch, we finished the poster and started to move Treasure Island into sage lounge. We tried testing out Clifford on the sand, but his gearing was making alarming clacking noises, so we sent him to emergency gear repair/replacement. The sand grinding through the gearing had worn away at a bunch of the lego parts, especially the size 8 gears. We replaced these, and we also replaced the front axels, which had become bent. We also took the time to decorate a few of the treasure chests with “jewels.”

Panic before the exhibition:

We had a lot of trouble with our handyboards right before the start of the exhibition. They kept breaking and would refuse to listen to any of the switches. We’re not sure what the problem was, but after resetting the same handyboard several times, we switched to a new one. We were concerned about supplying power, because we didn’t know if the new handyboard was sufficiently charged, so we ran it “tethered” – i.e. plugged into a nearby wall. Clifford now had a leash. Another problem we noticed was the the motors kept popping up – so that the size eight gears were just barely hitting the next gears or not hitting at all. We tried gluing down the motors, which helped for a little while, but they popped off again. Eventually, we realized that when we had replaced the gearing, we hadn’t put back on the crossbeams that kept the structure squared off. We put these back on, and had no more trouble with the motors popping off. The new handyboard on a leash solved our weird handyboard problems.

The Exhibition:

Clifford was a big hit with the kids (once we got him to work, that is). They liked burying the treasure and trying to give Clifford “hints.” He worked well for the hour and a half, though by the end his gears were beaten up again from all the sand. Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to get hold of any pictures taken that day.