Day 3 (Wednesday, June 9, 2010)

Zachary's class on programming e-puck robots

Had a couple of hiccups at the start of class today. The loaner laptop we had as the instructor laptop, started acting up. It would not connect to the ICD2 or ICD3 programmer that hooks up to the e-puck. Then, its keyboard failed. We hooked up a USB keyboard, but that too wouldn't work...application windows would just close as soon as we hit a key on the keyboard. Lukcily, we got this figured out promptly. The students' laptops were working fine and Zach was able to program the robots for each of the students.





The first program we wrote and ran on the e-puck was to make it blink LEDs in a pattern. Next order of the day was to get the e-puck robots to move. A small program was given to everyone for doing this. Then, we attached a sharpie pen to each robot. This made each robot into a line-tracer robot. First, we made straight line patterns. We really wish we had more ICD programmers so that things could move faster. But the groups did exceptionally well, patiently sharing the single ICD2 programmer between themselves.

Then, each group started making there own robot tracer patterns. All these patterns were fascinating. Here are a couple of photographs with the patterns that some groups made.