This year's FLL theme is Climate Connections, and our team chose the effect of climate on our local wineries as our research project topic. We found that wineries are in trouble because our climate is getting warmer and eventually the types of grapes that are grown here in the Willamette Valley (mostly Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris) have a very narrow temperature range that they can grow in. We're looking at two solutions, one a design to limit the amount of heat that the wine grapes get, and another to help slow down human-caused global warming.

This week we invited Charlotte Anthony from a local organization called Victory Gardens for All to come and talk to us about climate change and how helping people grow food at home can stop food from being shipped from a long ways away and help eliminate greenhouse gasses caused from food transportation.

We decided that we are going to give away bucket gardens as part of our research project to help people start growing food at home.

Having Fun in Happy Rainbow Land

The team has dubbed this year's challenge board as "Happy Happy Rainbow Land", and we're busy designing attachments and programs to tackle the challenges on the board. This year's missions seem more difficult overall than last year's, and the balls (carbon) are giving the team the most headaches.

Welcome to our new FLL team blog

Our team, "Veni Vidi Roboti" has been going strong since this summer, when we decided to work our way through LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT: The Mayan Adventure . The kids had fun making robots to traverse tomb tunnels and swing on vines across deadly spike-filled caverns, ala an Indiana-Jones-style adventure. Here's just a few of the imaginative solutions they came up with for a vine-traversing robot. The robot had to somehow make its way along a vine strung across a large cavern while carrying a pebble. When it reached the opposite wall of the cavern, it had to drop the pebble into a jar and return to get the next pebble. When the jar reached a certain weight, a door into the next tomb opened. We simulated the cavern and vine with a rope strung across our living room.
The kids took some time to test out a variety of different designs to traverse the vine, from clawed hands to gears to a single gear system like a gondola. Eventually they concluded that the triple-gear system worked best for propulsion along the vine, especially as the vine swung upwards towards the final attachment spot. One gear gripped the vine and the other larger gears kept it from slipping off
Next it was time to devise an attachment that would hold a pebble without dropping it as it moved across the vine, and be able to drop it with precision into a bucket at the other end, via connection with a motor. Here's their final design for the pebble attachment, it tips downward with the rotation of the motor to release the pebble.

And here's their final design for the robot, without the attachment of the ultrasonic sensor that allowed it to know when it was finally approaching the wall.


Here's a video of the final robot in action, after they finished programming it (sorry for the poor quality, it was taken with a Blackberry). They decided to use an ultrasonic sensor to detect the approaching wall. The robot moves forward for a long ways, then begins moving in shorter increments which are separated by taking in data from the ultrasonic sensor. When it is the appropriate distance from the wall, it pauses, as the kids discovered that if it didn't pause, it would drop the pebble while it was still swinging and the accuracy would be off. Once it has stopped swinging, it drops the pebble and returns to the other side of the chamber to be re-loaded with the next pebble. They tested 8 pebbles in a variety of shapes and sizes and were able to drop them in the small jar with 90% accuracy. Extremely exciting for a few hours of work!