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Old 07-08-2010, 11:53 PM
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davidgeorge212
 
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Default RE: New to robot competions, Please give me your input

We went out and tried a magnet to see if it would pull the pipe up from the sand. It worked like a charm. We burried the pipe vertical, horizontal, filled it with sand, left it hollow, and every time the magnet was still able to pick it up out of the sand. But we are in separate groups and not all of us can use the magnet idea so I will half to come up with more ideas. We are now pursuing some sort of claw or rake as another alternative. The problem I am having is that I just dont know what orientation the pipe will be in, horizontal or vertical. I still am not sure if the pipe is going to be fully or only partially burried because that would make a big difference. And on top of that, they could possibly throw us off by putting in all aluminum pipes so a magnet might not even work.

So now Im looking at some kind of rake or claw that can easily penatrate sand and pick up the peice of pipe weather it be vertical or horizontal or any other orientation.

Its not helping us either that right now we are limited to using these little nxt lego brains as our "autonoumous" source. Is anyone familiar with the Lego NXT robotics? Is it possible to get a better quality stronger motor and wire it to work with the nxt brain? right now we will half to use two motor for the drive wheels and that only leaves one motor to do another function. It would be neat to figure out how be able to use more than 3 motors and also, if its possible, upgrade to better motors.