Archive for the ‘Cool projects’ Category

VEX IQ super user, Damien Kee, has made another very cool project! This time he found inspiration from one of our favorite robots, R2-D2, to create VEX2-D2. Made completely with VEX IQ parts, he used 3 motors to program the movements – one for each leg and one for the head. Damien says he hopes to have a set of building instructions for it sometime in the near future (and when he does, we will link to them here.) Check out the video below then visit Damien’s website to learn more about VEX2-D2 along with other resources he has to offer. Also, check out his page on Facebook too! Do you have a cool ROBOTC project you want to share with the world? If so, send us an email at socialmedia@robomatter.com and we’ll post it on our blog and social media pages!

Written by Cara Friez-LeWinter November 17th, 2016 at 6:00 am

Our friend, Our friend, Simon Burfield , put together a fantastic tutorial on how to get the your VEX IQ brain transferring data with your bluetooth enabled smartphone using the VEX Smart Radio and ROBOTC . Who doesn’t want to control their VEX IQ with a smartphone?!?! And if you were at VEX Worlds 2016, you might have seen the VEX IQ Smart Radio in action with Simon’s robots. Check out a preview below: To get started, you will need the following: An iOS device with xcode installed

A way to run ROBOTC 4.5 +

The VEX firmware update program The following video tutorial and steps below will guide you through the process: Steps



1) Install the VEX Smart Radio firmware on to the brain

2) Enable Smart Radio in ROBOTC

3) Install the RobotC Smart Radio firmware on to the brain

4) Download the code

5) Plug a motor in to port 8, a Touch LED in to port 2

6) Install the ROBOTC (BT Demo) program on to the brick

7) Disconnect the brain from the PC

8) Find your Smart Radio ID and remember it (mine was 7436)

9) Run the ROBOTC program on the brain (remember not to be connected via USB)

10) Load code project up and deploy to a iOS device that supports Bluetooth LE

11) Enter your Smart Radio ID in to the App and hit connect 1) Install the VEX Smart Radio firmware on to the brain2) Enable Smart Radio in ROBOTC3) Install the RobotC Smart Radio firmware on to the brain4) Download the code https://github.com/burf2000/VEXIQ_iOS_ROBOTC 5) Plug a motor in to port 8, a Touch LED in to port 26) Install the ROBOTC (BT Demo) program on to the brick7) Disconnect the brain from the PC8) Find your Smart Radio ID and remember it (mine was 7436)9) Run the ROBOTC program on the brain (remember not to be connected via USB)10) Load code project up and deploy to a iOS device that supports Bluetooth LE11) Enter your Smart Radio ID in to the App and hit connect Once connected you should be able to control the motor and the LED! You can find the original code by James Pearman here. And this is Simon’s code shown in the video tutorial. Have questions? Head over to our ROBOTC VEX IQ Forum and we can help you out. Happy Programming! Do you have a cool ROBOTC project you want to share with the world? If so, send us an email at socialmedia@robomatter.com and we’ll post it on our blog and social media pages!

Written by Cara Friez-LeWinter May 18th, 2016 at 6:00 am

Damien Kee, a VEX IQ and EV3 Super User, has created another cool project! This time he used one of his kids toys, the Tumble Bug Ball Drop, to test out how often the ball comes out of the left foot / right foot with a 50% probability. Damien says, “My boys got this toy for Christmas one year and I thought I’d put together a little device to check the probability of how it works. I used Ultrasonic Sensors with the EV3 and Colour Sensors (Proximity mode) with the IQ to keep track every time a ball went through the toy…. This would make a great experiment to run in class, not just with the Tumble Bug but all different types of kids toys.” We couldn’t agree more! Damien used the VEX IQ and LEGO EV3 programmed in ROBOTC to run his tests. The programs figure out the percentage and display them on screen. Here is a full breakdown video of how the project was done …



Not only does this project allow for the practice of programming, but it gives the opportunity to assess variables when determining the results. Damien says: ” What I love about doing these sort of extended investigations in class, is that rather than being a final conclusion, this now opens up a huge range of other questions and scenarios that you can test. Why was there a difference?

Was the table level?

Do the different balls have an impact?

Does the placement speed in the mouth affect the results?” Want to try it out yourself? Here are the code files Damien used:

EV3 RobotC – EV3_tumblrbug.c

VEX IQ RobotC – tumblrbug_VEX.c To see the full hardware setup and find out the final results, check out his full blog here – Testing the Tumblebug (EV3 and VEX IQ) Do you have a cool ROBOTC project you want to share with the world? If so, send us an email at socialmedia@robomatter.com and we’ll post it on our blog and social media pages!

Written by Cara Friez-LeWinter March 2nd, 2016 at 6:00 am

For our latest Cool Project, we have guest bloggers, Team 8086A – Team Semiconductors to discuss their unique dual-bot for last year’s VEX Robotics Skyrise competition. They went on to win the 2015 World Championship Science Division Create Award! Read more below … ———————————————————– For the 2014-2015 VEX Robotics game, Skyrise, Team 8086A, Team Semiconductors, built a very unique robot, a dual-bot. This robot’s unique design included many advantages, most significantly the ability to multitask. However, along with the advantages came many challenges. The team worked hard all year to conquer the challenges and the assistance of ROBOTC in many of these challenges was invaluable. Team Semiconductors Team Semiconductor is a group of friends in Glen Allen, Virginia. This independent team has its roots in two middle school VEX World Championship competitive robotics teams, Team Theodore (6740C) and Team Dave (6740D). Several students from the two teams and their school’s Technology Student Association (TSA) who were moving on to high school and wanted to compete in VEX Robotics banded together to create a new team, Team Semiconductors. Midway through the 2014-2015 season (Skyrise), the team revealed their one-of-a-kind design: Arty the Dual-Bot. Skyrise Skyrise was the 2014-2015 Vex robotics game. The goal of Skyrise was to build a skyrise (a yellow pylon, built piece by piece). 4 points were awarded each section built, and putting cubes (hollow cubes, 8 inches wide) on the skyrise were worth another 4 points each. Then, you could put the cubes on varying height poles for 2 points, and if you had the top cube on the post, you scored 1 extra point. This was the tallest game vex had ever made. The highest item was the robot built skyrise which at max was about 60 inches tall. Arty: The Dual-Bot Arty is a very unique robot designed to compete in Skyrise: a dual-bot. Arty consisted of two parts each performing specialized tasks simultaneously: an immovable tower that is dedicated to building a skyrise, and a rover, whose task is to move around the field placing cubes on poles and on the skyrise. These two pieces have a connector running between the two holding the wiring, and they also give the robot its name, “Arty” (RT for Rover/Tower).



Team Semiconductors had multiple reasons for using a dual-bot. The most important reason was the ability to multi-task, which allowed for higher scoring and the ability to still compete if our alliance partner is a no-show. This bot was made possible due to the high scoring potential in the starting area, with scoring skyrises. We noticed that many robots that would do skyrises wouldn’t even leave the starting square for the first minute, while stacking skyrises. We thought it would be best to have a stationary robot in there to score those while another part of our robot was doing something else. One of the biggest advantages of the stationary tower was its precision; instead of relying on time to move the skyrise, we could use potentiometers to measure the position of our claw, and drop the pylon once it lined up. Arty can score high by itself in matches, up to 58 points on its own without autonomous bonus, allowing it to be able to carry most matches, regardless of alliance partner. It also has high skills scores, with the second highest Driver Skills and Programming Skills scores in Virginia, with 43 and 27 points, respectively. Why ROBOTC Two main factors came into play for us choosing ROBOTC to program Arty: it’s easy to learn and it has the ability to use tasks. The first factor was essential, as our team had no previous experience in ROBOTC. The only previous experience with programming robots our team had came from using block code. The transition to using a text-based language, especially one we had almost no base in was worrying, and lead to questions about our ability to learn the language in-time to program the robot. Our lead programmer had experience in programming languages, but no experience in C-based languages, meaning there was a lot of learning involved in the first few weeks of programming. However, after those few weeks, we felt confident in our abilities with the program, and were able to create the complex programs used in Arty with almost no syntax trouble. The second factor was specific mainly to Arty, but still very important. Due to Arty being a dual-bot, we needed a way to run programs for the rover and the tower at the same time. This was allowed by tasks, which can run side by side with each other, unlike functions, which run one after the other. These tasks allowed us to run the rover and tower side by side, but also allowed for smaller additions to increase efficiency. How ROBOTC was Used As mentioned above, one of the key elements of our programming of “Arty” was the use of tasks for the control of both rover and tower. We used separate tasks in both driving and autonomous functions. We also used tasks to increase efficiency in our programs. For example, we used tasks to turn the tower arm and raise the tower simultaneously instead of one after the other to save time. One problem we came up against with tasks was the inability to pass inputs into the tasks. To get around this we created functions that modified global variables and then called the tasks, and used those global variables for things that would’ve needed to be input into the task. One of the most interesting things we did in the rover’s drive tasks was creating a turret-centric drive. The turret on rover that could swing 360 degrees was always facing forward on the robot. Since we had an X-drive, any direction could be the front of the robot; it was all in how we programmed the wheels. One of the biggest problems rover had was its inability to turn without getting tangled in the connector. We put a turret on the top of the robot to prevent us from having to turn, but this made driving awkward. The solution to this: a turret-centric drive. We measured the location of the turret with a quad encoder and adjusted the values in Robot C according to which way the turret was facing. This made it so that whenever we hit up on the joystick the rover always drove in the direction its turret was facing, making it much easier to drive, since it now had a distinct “front”. In programming our tower, we found that we were always doing the same thing, but we were just changing times for movement, and target locations to account for swing. To save time and space in our program we used a for loop that looped for however many skyrises we were going to build. At the start of the loop we had a switch statement to assign all the values based on which piece we were stacking. We then had our previous generic code that we had been writing out inserted, with variables instead of numbers being used. This saved a lot of time in programming, as all values that needed to be adjusted were easily found in one place. Due to the way the tower was built, sometimes our arm would get caught on something, and not finish the turn. To get around this our turn function had a self-check built in. At the start of the task, we would calculate approximately how long it should take for our arm to reach its position. At the end of the time period, we would then check to make sure we were in position. If we were not, we’d raise our arm and then try to turn again. This process would repeat for 3 times at most. If it reached its location, it would then lower the arm the same amount it raised it and continue the program. If it never reached its location it would set a variable to false, and then the program would stop, to avoid wasting scoring objects by dropping them. ROBOTC helped the team maximize our unique robot design and Team Semiconductors went on to win the 2015 World Championship Science Division Create Award with Arty the dual-bot. You can learn more about Team Semiconductors and follow us on social media at http://www.VEXTeam8086.org. – Team Semiconductors ———————————————————– Test Your Skills with our Virtual Competitions! If you’re looking for a cost-effective and fun way to participate in a robotics competition, check out or low cost, high quality virtual competitions that enable students to test their problem solving and programming skills. Our VEX Nothing But Net and VEX IQ Bank Shot Robot Virtual World Competitions both simulate the single-player Robot Skills and Programming Skills modes of the physical Nothing But Net and Bank Shot competitions. And, the winners of the Robomatter sponsored VEX Nothing But Net and VEX IQ Bank Shot Robot Virtual World competition will receive an invitation to the VEX World Championship April 20-23, 2016 at the Kentucky Expo Center in Louisville Kentucky! To learn more, check out this blog post. Do you have a cool ROBOTC project you want to share with the world? If so, send us an email at socialmedia@robomatter.com and we’ll post it on our blog and social media pages!

Written by Cara Friez-LeWinter January 6th, 2016 at 6:00 am

Tetris is a beloved and well-known classic game that many of us have been addicted to at one point or another. We wait patiently for that perfect “Tetrimino” that will create a horizontal line so the board continues to move down so the game keeps going. Well, our latest Cool Project does just that, but on a VEX IQ brain and programmed in ROBOTC! Petr Nejedly created the game as an experiment to see what could be done with the VEX IQ platform outside of robotics. He says, “I have coded it ad-hoc in one night. The code is pretty … short, not really pretty. 233 lines including (rare) comments.” When we spoke through email he mentioned that game is currently not random at all. “So, my son came to me, that he has an improvement to the program. That I should use this random() function, it will be more fun to play … Teachable moment! We have discussed, how a computer, a very exact instrument that always follows the same instructions and in fact only moves numbers here and there, come up with random numbers. What is a PRNG and how you have to seed it (srand()), what are real sources of randomness and what kind of issues such a lack of true randomness could cause in real world, besides lack of fun.” At this point, Petr said he would like to leave the actual fix to the curious readers/programmers out there to see what they can do with it. (Let us know if you do!) Check out the game in action here: Petr was nice enough to share the souce code, which you can download here. You can also read the original VEX IQ forum discussing the project here. Do you have a cool ROBOTC project you want to share with the world? If so, send us an email at socialmedia@robomatter.com and we’ll post it on our blog and social media pages!

Written by Cara Friez-LeWinter December 3rd, 2015 at 6:15 am

Kyle M. (aka Builderdude35) created a very cool project called the EV3 Krimzon Guard Security Tank! The tank is programmed in ROBOTC too, which was the first time Kyle programmed with our software. Kyle says, “[The EV3 Tank] features proportional IR beacon tracking, and a deadly-accurate turret targeting system. If that’s not enough, it also has a massive spiked steamroller on the front!” Watch the tank in action here:



The tank includes an EV3 brick, two EV3 large motors, steam roller with spikes, a rotating dual-barrel turret, and three sensors! “There is a Mindsensors SumoEyes mounted on the chassis just above the steam roller (you will see the two red LED’s) that detects the targets in zones left, right or straight ahead. Just above that is a LEGO Infrared sensor that is used for beacon tracking. Lastly, there is a LEGO Ultrasonic sensor that rotates with the turret to confirm target acquisition.” Pretty awesome! For a more detailed breakdown of the tank and code, visit his website here. Do you have a cool ROBOTC project you want to share with the world? If so, send us an email at socialmedia@robomatter.com and we’ll post it on our blog and social media pages!

Written by Cara Friez-LeWinter December 3rd, 2015 at 6:10 am

Damien Kee, a VEX IQ Super User, designed a really cool and creative Game of Simon using a VEX IQ Smart Brain, three Touch LEDs, and programmed with ROBOTC. He says, “This is my version of the Game of Simon for the VEX IQ. The TouchLED’s are an awesome input/output device that is just so natural to use. Programmed in ROBOTC and designed to be used as a way of teaching / reinforcing the concepts of arrays, in less than 100 lines of code.” Check out the video below that shows it in action … For a more detailed breakdown of the code, visit his website here. Damien also is sharing his code for others to use, which you can download here! (He just asks that if you do use it, please acknowledge and forgive any errors.) Do you have a cool ROBOTC project you want to share with the world? If so, send us an email at socialmedia@robomatter.com and we’ll post it on our blog and social media pages!

Written by Cara Friez-LeWinter November 2nd, 2015 at 6:00 am

Simon Burfield (a.k.a. Burf …an amazing nickname!) designed and programmed a VEX IQ Motorized Skateboard! This VEX IQ skateboard uses 2 VEXIQ brains / batteries, and 16 motors connected to 8 omnidirectional wheels. It is also programmed in ROBOTC!













Check out Burf’s website here for more cool project! Do you have a cool project you’d like to share? If so, send us an email at socialmedia@robotc.net.

Written by Cara Friez-LeWinter August 13th, 2015 at 7:15 am

Written by Cara Friez-LeWinter July 22nd, 2015 at 7:00 am

The end of the school year is here and to celebrate, we’d love to showcase some of the ROBOTC projects and code you’ve been working on all year long! If you have a cool project (like these!) send us an email at socialmedia@robomatter.com with a description and your code, pictures, and/or videos. We’ll share it on our blog in an upcoming post!