If you've been following our Google+ and Twitter feeds you know we are getting ready for the WRO Footbal competition.  We've been working with data logging and wanted to share some techniques for other teams that want to use these features in the Labview Mindstorm software.
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Today we are trying to make sure our robot goes to the right goal because it wouldn't be very useful to score goals on ourselves!  To figure this out we needed to discover what the compass values were across the field.

To do this we created an Experiment in the LabView Mindstorm software which sampled the compass sensor values as we moved it across the field.

To learn more about how to create an experiment the following Lego Education video is really helpful:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP58lVrDA6I

Although Mindstorm provides alot of analysis tools we wanted to look at the data in Microsoft Excel.  To do this we had to export our experiment by doing the following:

Open a new experiment.

• Go to the Tools menu and select Data Log File Manager.
• Browse to the the .rdf file and click the Import button. (It can be on the brick or on your computer.)
• Close the Data Log File Manager
• On the Tools menu, select Export Datasets
• Save the file as a .csv file
• Open the .csv file in Excel

Once we opened the file in Excel we could determine the Min, Max and Standard Deviations for our sensor values.  This helped established what range to use for determining the direction the robot was facing. This is a BIG improvement over having to write these values down by hand which is what I had been doing before!

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Daisy Chaining the EV3

Hello faithful followers!

Today, we decided to try and Daisy Chain our EV3`s. For those of you who don`t know,

Daisy Chaining is a wiring scheme in which multiple devices are wired together in sequence or in a ring. 

This is helpful to us because we can use 16 motors and sensors instead of our regular 4.

The first thing we found was that you needed a USB cable to connect to from one EV3 to the next. Here`s one that was recommended, which seems to be a nice fit... we ended up using some that was laying around the house. what can you do?¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, we hooked up our four EV3`s togther via USB cable and than proceeded to connect our main one via bluetooth. We quickly found that we had plugged it in the wrong order and it goes USB to PC. After we had gotten that figured out, we had to tell our software that we wanted to daisy chain.

To do that you have to go to the little wrench icon on the left hand of the screen which should look like this;

you should be able to see the words daisy chain mode by a little check box

click it and than voila! you have just enabled daisy chaining!

After that, go back to your program. When you drag an action block onto the canvas, it should look like this;

click on the little 1, and it should let you choose between your bricks! (1 being the main brick the computer is hooked up too, 2 being the one connected to that one and so on.)

Here`s a video of our final product!