SciBorg fun!

This assignment was our first time working with SciBorgs!
Before our main tasks we were given a activity to introduce us to Arduino functions:

Then we got our hands on our very first SciBorg! And played around with the single motor program, then we got down to business with our tasks.
1. BothMotors: create a sketch that runs both the motors at the same time and speed.
This task was pretty straightforward, all we really had to do was just add the second motor by copying what was already there for the first motor.

2. Minimum Speed: Find the minimum speed that allows your SciBorg to move.
We first tried making the wheel move in the single motor program and found that the slowest speed for a wheel to move is 55, but when we put it in the BothMotor program and put it on the ground it didn't move. Realizing that getting the wheel to turn and getting the SciBorg to move are two different things we then tried setting it at 65, 60, 70 then finally 75 which we found to be the minimum speed for the SciBorg to move.

3. Hard Turn: Make a sketch for the SciBorg to make a hard turn
This was also a pretty straightforward task, we just did as instructed and put one motor full power forward and on motor full power reverse.

4. Soft Turn: Make a sketch for the SciBorg to make a gentler turn.
The first thing we tried was just making the speeds smaller, so we made both the speeds 150 and 150 which did give us a gentler turn.

But we wanted to test the limits of how gentle we could make this turn, so we tested out a bunch of other variables:
-Increasing delay: This just made the turn longer, so the angle of the turn was far more dramatic.










-Making the reverse speed smaller: (forward 150, reverse 75) When we did this the SciBorg didn't even move, we hypothesized that the differences between the speeds were to great so the turn would not work. We then tried setting forward 150, reverse 100: this time the SciBorg did turn, but only slightly and it was not consistent. We hypothesized that we need to set the speeds equal and so we had our next experiment:
-Setting both the speeds equal and slower: (forward 75, reverse 75) This also did not turn to our surprise. We concluded that turning requires a fairly high reverse speed.

<--Forward 150, Reverse 100















Forward 75, Reverse 75 ->





5. Does it measure up? Time how long it takes for the SciBorg to travel 10 ft. Write a sketch that makes the SciBorg travel for this much time and then stop. Why doesn't the SciBorg stop on the line?
Our SciBorg took 16 seconds to reach the 10 ft. So we altered the sketch by adding a "if(millis()<1600)" statement so that when the SciBorg has run for 16 seconds the SciBorg will stop (it's velocity will be zero). When we tested it out after this we found that the SciBorg stopped short of the finish line by 6 inches. Why? Well when we did our 10 ft tests the SciBorg actually started making curves despite the speeds for both motors being the same. We concluded that in real life two motors can never run at exactly the same speed. There are also many other variables like the flatness of the surface of the ground and the battery life that can effect the path of a SciBorg. which is why sensors in many ways are a more accurate way of getting a SciBorg to go exactly 10 ft.