Fire Fighting Robot- Part 8 Other Problems

To make our MotorCar perform better we added capacitors on our breadboard. Although we did not have problems with this, we wanted to prevent our LogoChip from frying up. By having the MotorCar spin left and right rapidly, it can cause the LogoChip to fry up and by using capacitors it allowed us to smooth the output of power supplies. Here is a picture of the capacitors (in blue) on our breadboard:
Another problem that we had was with programming. Because we relied a lot on counts and our straight prorportional program, we had to remember to re-set our "count a" and our "count b" back to 0 whenever we told the MotorCar to move forward for a certain amount of counts. In this video below, you can see the effect of not re-setting the counts to zero because instead of the car moving straightforward, it went off a different direction. This was a major problem because our goal was to direct the MotorCar towards the candle and it was frustrating when the car deviated away from it.

Below is a video of our MotorCar missing the target:

As you can see, the MotorCar passes the candle because the sensor values that we set in our program were off. When Esther and I tested out what the sensors read when they were very close to the candle, we recorded the values and set them in our program. However, as time went on and the candle decreased in size, which changed the values that the sensors read at that specific location. So as the MotorCar was spinning around to locate the candle, it was a bit off and it deviated away from it. This was a recurring problem that we had and in order to fix this problem, we had to constantly check our sensor values.