Lego Mindstorm is one the best things we did class so far. Lego Mindstorm is when we had to build a little car with Lego pieces and a NXT. The NXT is a small computer where you can program it tell the motors what to do and when to turn and stop. Assembling the car we had to use a Lego piece that’s where the Lego part in the name comes in. Building it was such a pain because we had to improvised since there were pieces missing. When you assemble you had to use Lego pieces to connect the motors to the NXT so the NXT can tell the motors when to go and stop. After we had assembled the car my partner Mohammed and I had to program the car to do a simple task such as goes in a circle with a radius of 10 inches.we did tat by connecting the car to the mac via USB and launching Lab View. Lab View is a program that can help us program the car. We could have programmed the car to do anything we wanted such as brake, only the left wheel turn, only the right wheel turns, Etc. After doing that we had to find out how many times that car moved to our calculations to what the computer said. After doing that we had to find the percent error and if we were under 10% percent then we would be all set.

The formula we used was
((|ruler reading-computer reading|)/(average of the two))*100= equals percent error

The first one we got was
((|1.26-.2751|)/(.2675))*100= 3.37
The percent error of that was 3.37%

The second one we got was
((|1.373-.377|)/(.375))*100= 1.066
The percent error was 1.066%

The third one we got was
((|.179-.16|)/(.1695))*100= 11.2
The percent error we got was 11.2% a little bit over

The last one we got was
((|.089-.073|)/(.081))*100= 19.75
The percent error on this one was 19.75% we were really over on this one.

In general this activity was really fun to do since it did include something interesting. The best thing we did would have to be building the NXT since that took the class quite a while to do. The calculations we had to do were somewhat right since two of ours were under 10% while the other two were not. If we did have more time with the program and the NXT we could of done so much more than what we had to. If had the chance to buy I would but the starter kit is too expensive for me. But I do want to buy it when I get the money to it would like a fun project to do when I want to see what it is capable of.
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My notes and my memory