VA State TSA Competition

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
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I just got back yesterday from the Virginia TSA state competition and I was surprised at just how much Vex hardware was being used there as control technology. My project was an animatronic hand which I will be posting a full youtube video of this weekend (its very cool). It ended up taking 2nd in the state because it was well downright awesome (we lost to an animatronic penguin ERRRRR!!!).

Here is a quick picture of my project, it is an older one and the project has since become smaller and more compact along with some additional hardware.

http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/6337/myprog.jpg
By robofreak, shot with Droid at 2010-04-26

The first picture is of the guys who got 3rd place which I had thought was my only real competition.

http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/4970/bartendern.jpg
By robofreak, shot with Droid at 2010-04-26

They built a robotic bartender and it was based off mostly Vex hardware and components. In this picture you can see that the claw is composed of a vex servo and metal parts, and you can see a vex bumber. If you look into the head area you can also see another motor/servo.

http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/2405/under1i.jpg
By robofreak, shot with
By robofreak, shot with Droid at 2010-04-26

Underneath there is a large amount of vex hardware interfaced with a non vex metal gearmotor which I thought was very cool. It allows the bar tender to slide left and right on the tracks about 1ft in each direction.

This was a cool project but they didn’t win 1st or 2nd because they were having technical problems getting the audio to play and other small things kept happening. Though one thing about this design was very bad they wrote a java program on the computer to play audio files then mounted a motor over the keyboard to push a key to signal the audio to play. This worked but the audio was out of sync. Wouldn’t it have been easier to spend a little bit of time and get a serial connection working? Once they saw how much was in my project they immediately said dang I wish you were on my team. Though unfortunately we can’t as we don’t attend the same school.

There were other things that were based on vex as well such as these two robots which were pretty cool.

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/2981/bot2n.jpg
By robofreak, shot with Droid at 2010-04-26

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Another few pictures.

The second vex based robot.

http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/2174/botyb.jpg
By robofreak, shot with Droid at 2010-04-26

Now whoever set this project up put it WAY TO CLOSE to my project (within 10ft). I’m not trying to be mean or anything but they put a very rough concept model next to a very functional model (my model/project). Not good for comparison between the two.

Anyway here is the picture, and again it is based off Vex.

http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/231/handg.jpg
By robofreak, shot with Droid at 2010-04-26

That last thing that I found which was based off Vex was some sort of engineering project but I couldn’t find out what it did, use your imagination I guess.

http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/412/vexthingy.jpg
By robofreak, shot with Droid at 2010-04-26

The last two pictures are unrelated to Vex but I was very angry at the Judges for not letting these guys place at all (1st, 2nd, or 3rd). They put a lot of effort into this project and compared to the others in the Engineering Design competition it was far superior in build quality and ingenuity. I had talked to them and they said everyone thought it was awesome except for the Judges, go figure.

http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/7200/arcadegx.jpg
By robofreak, shot with Droid at 2010-04-26

And the interior wiring.

http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/3825/arcadein.jpg
By robofreak, shot with Droid at 2010-04-26

Pretty much what that did was simulate an old school arcade machine with modern hardware. All the joysticks and buttons were hooked up to a controller board and finally connected to a laptop where they had custom software games running. A monitor was embedded into the box and the whole thing ran off batteries.

I hope you guys like the pictures. If you want higher resolution photos you can visit my imageshack page and look for the 1mb plus versions of the photos. I didn’t post them here because they are not automatically scaled resulting in MASSIVE images and they load really slow.

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I have just uploaded the video of my project to youtube. Go and check it out!

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