Nano Drone Flight Manual

How to use this lab

You build a robot out of real parts, wire it up, and write the code that runs it. Nothing here is pretend: a servo asked for more than it can give will not give it, a block wider than the jaws will not be picked up, and an arm told to reach past its own length will not stretch.

Four steps, in this order

1. Build. Click parts in the library on the left. For the robot arm, add the Arm Base Plate first — everything else clips onto it. The list will not let you run until every part is on the bench.
2. Wire. Click a glowing pin, then click the pin it should join. The list on the right ticks off each connection as you make it. If two pins should not be joined, the lab says so instead of quietly accepting it.
3. Run. Press RUN SIMULATION. If something is missing or miswired, a box tells you exactly what — it is not a puzzle.
4. Code. Press Edit Arduino Code, change one number, press Apply & Run, and watch what the robot does differently. That loop — change one thing, look — is the whole point of the lab.

What is on the screen

• Four views of the same robot: top, isometric, front and side. Drag to orbit the isometric one, scroll to zoom, double-click any view to make it fill the screen. Press R to reset one view, H to reset them all.
• The bar across the top is the robot's own controls — how many blocks, what size, where to put them. It only appears while the simulation is running.
• The readout is the small panel of live numbers. Drag it by its title if it is covering something you want to see.
• The two side rails — parts on the left, wiring on the right — slide away on their own once you press Run, because the building is over. Hover the tab at the screen edge to peek, click it to keep it out.

The robot arm, in particular

The arm has three joints and a gripper. The base turns left and right, the shoulder lifts, the elbow bends, and the jaws open and close. Every servo takes 0–180°, and nothing you write can make one go further.

• Blocks are what the arm picks up. Press Place → Block on the top bar, then click anywhere on the table. There is no snapping: the block lands exactly where you clicked, even somewhere the arm cannot reach — and then the lab tells you it cannot reach it.
• Place → Stand drops a small platform to put a block on top of, and Clear takes the stands away.
• Size picks which block the next click drops. They are not just bigger: a cube twice as wide is eight times as heavy, so the large one needs a much harder squeeze.
• Shuffle moves every block to a new angle, so a mission that only worked because you remembered the numbers stops working.
• Click a block to open its card — where it is, how far out, at what angle, how big, how heavy, and whether the arm can reach it. The card follows the block while the arm carries it. Drag it by its title bar.

The code panel has four tabs

A first mission, start to finish

1. Run the simulation, then open the code panel and go to Mission.
2. Pick a block size. Set where it starts (a distance and an angle) and where it has to go.
3. Press Plan it. Each step appears as a row you can edit. Rows the arm cannot do are marked, with the reason.
4. Press Write it into the sketch. Your plan becomes real Arduino code.
5. Put a block on the table where your plan said it would be, then press Apply & Run.

Numbers worth knowing

When something does not work

• "jaws closed on nothing" — the arm shut its gripper where no block was. Check the angle you sent it to against the block's card.
• "slipped" — the squeeze was too weak for the weight. Your gripForce() was asked for a mass; check you gave it the right one.
• "stalled at 2.16 cm" — not a fault. The jaws were told to close and met a solid block, so they stopped on its faces. That is what holding something looks like.
• "out of reach" — no combination of angles will get there. Move the block, or accept it and plan around it.
• The arm keeps repeating — that is loop() doing what loop means. If the job is finished, the code has to say so.