Lab 13: Building Sensors For Your Robot

In this lab, we focused on making sensors for our VEX robots.  We first constructed a flame sensor circuit and tested the phototransistor with a candle.  Once the circuit was completed, we used the flame of the candle to get sensor readings.

You can see that as she brings the candle closer to the phototransistor, the sensor readings on the serial monitor are changing.  The phototransistor is working properly and this quick exercise confirmed it.



We then constructed our own flame sensor by soldering the phototransistor to a resistor and lead wires.  Once the soldering was completed, we inserted heat shrink tubing over the connections and shrunk them to protect the connections from shorting out.  This flame sensor will be attached to our VEX robot and used to detect the candle flame in the maze which we hope to extinguish by then turning on fans that will blow out the candle.



Lab 13 finished!