Beware the Untitled Scorpion!

Are you afraid of the screech of the scorpion, the poison of its stinger? If so, you ought to look down, for the Untitled Scorpion is walking about tonight!

Video

Process

The theme was “What are you afraid of?” and when we started talking, there was an immediate theme of bugs. The idea we had ended up being a scorpion robot, that at the press of a button, would start a random delay between 5-10 seconds, and after which, the stinger would lunge forward at the judges. With this, we would also have a website designed, and a video posted on the website. We mostly chose this project because it incorporated everyone’s skills while combining a fear we all had or could at least relate with.

Day 1

The first day was not very eventful, mostly filled with designing and building the actual robot, Alec getting video footage to edit, Robbie working on the voiceover script, and Ivan working on his website. Anna was working on building the robot because she didn’t have anything to design until it was built. At the end of the day, however, Ivan thought about the possibility of using a Raspberry Pi to run his website, that way he could update the website, and increase a tally every time the button was pressed. We also realized at the end of the day that the stinger lunging forward wouldn’t really work with the time we had allotted, so we changed the idea to the claws snapping forward instead.

Day 2

Day 2 was when things really started to gain momentum, we had a frame, and we were able to quickly get the claws added to the frame and wired to the Arduino. Alec came in and mentioned that the video would take a long time to edit, so we transitioned to a timelapse video, while the process was described on the website. Robbie started to work with programming the Arduino, with some help from Brooke, which was a lot of trouble because we didn’t really understand how Vex motors worked with positive and negative powers, losing a lot of time with that. Ivan was working on formatting the Raspberry Pi for the whole day, and he was able to get it working by 10:25, the only thing left for him was to import the summary text to the website. Anna started working on spray painting the cardboard to put over the robot and got it finished by around 9:45. The really only thing we needed to finish was the actual coding aspect of it.