Our progress…

Now we’ve already paired the mobile phone and the robot (it was also difficult because of the pairing code which is hard coded into the robot), but they have some difficulties in protocol. The data is sending in some strange way and we can not find the rules and logicality. I was surprised to find that there is actually no documentation about the Bluetooth protocol and the rules of data transmitting. This forces us to search answers for all our questions in experiment. This means that we are trying sending it different sets of integers and after that we look on the received result. Of course this approach is quite original and new for us and it develops online theory generation, but actually I do not like it. I fell that I do not understand the idea and trying to use brute force algorithm. As I know from my previous studies it can give the result after huge time period and it is not appropriate in this course.

Actually I thought that it would be easy to find information. Possibly knowing these problems in advance I would select more common task. In this case I would even have an opportunity to ask my group mates about the problems I faced. Moreover I can assume that almost all problems of the groups who choose similar projects are the same. This gives them some advantages. On the other hand we will do something almost new and it can exceed all our problems. Of course in case if we will overcome those problems and receive some result.

According to the seminar:

I think that intermediate presentations were not very informative. Logically I understand the idea of having such seminars: they give teacher information about each group progress and also enforce students to do something during the semester instead of doing all the project on the last week. But for me they are boring a little because actually there is no enough student activity during one week of work to create interesting presentation.

It was interesting moment during the last weekend. The friends of mine visited me and found the Lego Mindstorm which was forgotten on the table after several unsuccessful attempts to tune it up, write something for it and the last but not the least to see the result. I was really surprised because they forget everything and began to play with it as it was the best thing in the world. We programmed the sensors in a way we saw in videos on youtube.com web-page – now our scorpion tries to bite if it sees something close to his “eyes”.

Actually I thought that robots are attractive for kinds, may be for teenagers who are interested in engineering sciences. But it turned out, that for 23 years old mans who are not too old and serious, but adults such kind of robots is very exciting. After that 2 of them said that they were going to buy a set of Logo Mindstorm on Monday.

For this kind of people those robots cannot be called educational, because they’ve already know foundations of programming, engineering and other sciences which educational robotics usually helps to study. I’m not actually sure that they will get some imaginary knowledge from playing with robots, but I definitely thing that it is good to have such practice.

So now we are going “Remote control” system to control the robot using mobile phone. We’ve already install Lejos operating system on our Lego Mindstorm, and configure the development environment. After that we’ve tried to write some java code for robot, and it was successfully loaded and executed. Moreover we installed Nokia phone emulator to test our application. So, now we finished preparatory and tuning part and ready for programming our project. We are going to begin during the weekend.

So is our group – for last week we had not seen our robot and had not decided what exactly we would do during our project. We tried to think about “Programming for LEGO NXT using mobile devices” but we found some difficulties. The biggest problem was how to compile code on mobile device. The code is compiled not by Java compiler, but by special compiler which is required to be rewritten for mobile device (for example pocket PC). We decided it was too complex task and we could not do it in time.

During first follow-up seminar I understood that actually nobody had done something really important and interesting for that moment. Most of us were telling some general things and showing presentations with beautiful pictures.

While I was reading the articles for this week task, I was really surprised to know about PicoCricket robot. On one hand it is similar to LEGO Mindstorm kit but on the other hand it is quite different. It is much more female and festive, and it is of course more suitable and interesting for small girls than any “soccer player” robot. I was not expected such king of robots and also I was not expected that the question how to attend more girls into the robotics is under discussion and many peoples are engaged in it!

During last lecture I was amazing about the way children write the programs for LEGO. These icons and links are strange colored, but they are understandable! It really can improve the process of basic programming topics education. I remembered at once how did I explain the “for” loop for the children from 6^th form and they could not understand it in no way

But on the other hand I cannot actually understand what does mean “using robots in education”? The one thought I have is to give them for children to learn them the basic ideas of programming and engineering. It is quite narrow area from my point of view but we talk about “educational robotics” as if it is one of the main ways to use the robots.

During the introduction lecture it was surprising to see the LEGO Mindstorm robot and to know that we would do a project using it. Actually it is like a good sign of fortune to have such course because I dreamed of trying LEGO Mindstorm and I think it is interesting as well as useful.

This blog was created as a Learning Diary for the Implementation Technology course.