Video tutorials

Using everything that we've learned about LEGO Education SPIKE Prime competition programming we arrive at the final boss mission - how do we consistently reach a mission model at the other end of the field. Consistently. Every time. We use line following, motion sensor, counting of lines and border alignment. All the different concepts that we've looked at separately are now implemented together.

In this first part we stop at an algorithm that is the base for following lines and explains the basic idea for the proportion. A must watch if you want to understand the robot at its behaviour. At the end the program still wont work so check out Part 2 and Part 3 for the final steps.  

This is a recording of a completely perfect, 10 out of 10 accomplishment of a two-part mission - Train tracks, from the FIRST LEGO League 2021-2022 Cargo Connect competition. Due to the proper use of motion and color/light sensors, the robot is 100% consistent and reliable for a non-trivial mission. Even when the robot makes a mistake, it auto-corrects and compensates for this mistake.

We start a course for following a line with crosses and gaps. This is a challenge that one of the users at FLLCasts.com was trying to accomplish and asked us for advice. We present the whole challenge to you step-by-step. But first, let's also see the whole run of the line following algorithm. With this course, we also do an introduction of using State Machine as a programming pattern.

Very simple and basic introduction to the color sensor in the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 set. The first program is to stop at a line. Then we can move from stoping at line to counting lines and even more complex tasks.

In a competition environment like the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) or World Robotics Olympiad (WRO) the color sensor is more than useful. It makes positioning on the field quite easy and precise. 

Looking at the field we must first think of a strategy of solving this line following problem. There are rules that the robot must follow and these rules should be programmed in the robot. 

Counting lines and stopping on the third is the subject of this video. It is important to know how to do this in order to conduct more than one experiment in STEM classes (if we consider that each line is an experiment)

In this video we are showing how to use two light sensors to do basic aligning on a black line. This is always needed at the competitions. We also show an example for following a line with two sensors. 

In this video we are solving one of the most important challenges on the FIRST LEGO League competition, i.e how to cover your Mindstorms NXT light sensors so that they are not affected by outer light sources at the day of the competition. Once again you would find 3 solutions and more will come in the next videos.

Would you like to resolve all the problems with the light/color sensors that you have? And to make all of them work in a predictable, stable way even when using more than one MINDSTORMS colour sensors. 

When using Color sensors it is important to calibrate them depending on the light conditions in your venue. In this way, the calibrated sensor will show values between 0 and 100 independent of the light conditions. But using the default EV3 colour calibration available in the colour sensor block could lead to unpredicted problems that are difficult to track and resolved especially when used with multiple Color sensors. So in this series of tutorial we implement the calibration ourselves discussing the principles of colour sensor calibration.

Based on a request from Abdulah we decided to build a tutorial on how to use Hi Technic Color Sensor and EV3-G Software. There is a special block imported in the software that helps you use the sensor.

In this episode we do a full run of the mission for collecting a single treasure before going into explanation on how we have programmed the robot.

To win the FLL robotics competition you should surely use light sensors for navigating on the field. But the performance of the light sensors is affected by the surrounding light which means you might get different results on the training and on the competition table. This is where calibration is useful. In this video I will show you an easy way to do calibration along with a few examples.

As an extension to the previous video we talk about the Hi Technic Color Sensor again.

Vision is still one of the very few fields where a human being could outsmart a computer. Still. Colour/Light sensors are the cornerstones of implementing a smart LEGO Mindstorms robot that could at least partially do "vision". In this video tutorial, we are using the robotics sensor to detect loading and unloading of the catapult.

The Telephone game is played with 2 or more robots and is extremely funny. Each robot has a color wheel that can be rotated through the medium motor and a color sensor. The first robot on the left rotates the color wheel to a random color. The second robot must detect the color on the wheel and rotate its color wheel to this color. The third detects the color wheel of the second and so on. 

It is described in details in Lesson 4 of Level C2. Cooperation

Following the previous tutorials from the course, implement the calibration of the minimum and maximum values. 

This animation demonstrates the principle of aligning to a line with two color sensors and a LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor robot. This is a useful concept for FIRST LEGO League competitions where you want to know exactly where you are on the field and to achieve consistent behavior. In the course lesson you will also find a live video tutorial where we enter into more details about aligning. We align the robot to a line by moving both sensors slowly until they both see a black line. When one of them sees the line we move only the other. At the end we return the first sensor back.