Inspiring Mindstorms EV3 Programming for FLL Part 6: Unregulated Motor Block

After learning how to build the Gripping Fingers mechanism from THE LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 IDEA BOOK, twe took note of the author Yoshihito Isogawa’s recommendation to use the EV3 Unregulated Motor Block instead of the standard ones to prevent overextending. His suggestion was very interesting to us. we decided to test the Unregulated Motor Block alongside the standard Medium Motor Block in our program. In this post, we will share our experience with using the Unregulated Motor Block.

Based on the book mentioned above, we built a Gripping Fingers mechanism as shown below.

Gripping Fingers
Gripping Fingers Attachment

We attached the Gripping Fingers attachment to our programming robot as shown below. The Gripping Fingers attachment was powered by a medium motor.

Gripping Fingers Attatched
Gripping Fingers Attatched

Gripping Fingers Programming Using Medium Motor Block

At first, we used  the standard Medium Motor Block to open and close the gripping fingers, as shown below. We would like to open and close the Gripping Fingers 5 times through a Loop block. We found that it over extended and our program stalled at the first Medium Motor block.

Gripping Fingers Using Medium Motor
Gripping Fingers Using Medium Motor

Gripping Fingers Programming Using EV3 Unregulated Motor Block

To avoid over extending and stalling, we tried EV3 Unregulated Motor Block as shown below. This time, it worked well!

Gripping Fingers Using EV3 Unregulated Motor
Gripping Fingers Using EV3 Unregulated Motor Block

The following video shows the Gripping Fingers in action.

If you’re interested in FLL robot design, please check out our robot design principle posts.