THE DAY OF

                                        
The final view of the pokemon arena! In action, here under Pokemon, are several videos.

Several modifications we made: we created a "shield" around the liquid nitrogen to prevent splashes. This limited the amount of smoke, but in the interest of safety, was very useful. The control box did not have foam over it, as described earlier, but just the lego box and the pennies visible.

Horrifyingly, plugging in the picoboard to the computer caused the resistances to change. We could not get the physical aspects of the pokemon to work while the computer game was running.

However, this may have been a blessing in disguise. Most of the children didn't know what pokemon was! So the battle would have confused them further. All the special effects alone was really a better idea.

The final count of special effects!
Charizard:
Smokescreen: Water pours into liquid nitrogen, creating smoke
Flamethrower: Water pours into liquid nitrogen, creating smoke. Flame in mouth wiggles back and forth
Slash: Arm moves back and forth
Earthquake: Entire arena shakes! Rumbly noises happen.

Electrode:
Thunderbolt: Lights along the side of the arena light up!
Magnet rise: String connecting Electrode to the beam on top grows shorter, so Electrode rises
Explosion: Lights along the side of the arena light up. Entire arena shakes. Lights inside Electrode light up
Mirror coat: Lights inside Electrode light up

Day 23 and 24: Bringing it all together

The program in Scratch, to emulate the actual Pokemon game (complete with HP!) has an image that looks like the Gen II games.

This is the frame of Electrode! Wrapping it in tissue paper is still what we're planning on...

The red wires are the lights! I soldered four red light emitting diodes together, so we don't have to have individual lights on single picocricket wires. Now one picocricket socket lights up four lights!

Similarly, there are another set of four lights soldered together along the arena. Those are yellow.

Instead of our original idea of hanging the arena, we're now going to balance it on some boxes, and have this mechanism to bounce the arena up and down. As per Prof Berg's suggestions, I added another layer of legos on top so that the bouncing motion is more up and down.

                                       
Charizard has been assembled! This is the interior of its mouth, with the flame moving back and forth.

A couple views of the inside of its body. This is the arm moving mechanism.... It finally works! The original rubber band (to pull the arm towards the center of its body when the cam wasn't pushing it up) was too weak, and the other rubber band was too strong, so we used two rubber bands instead! Now it finally works, though opening the body tends to derange  the mechanism. Yes, it is duct taped to the side of the body >>

                                            

This mechanism pulls up the Electrode! A rather simple idea, and it worked on the first try! Yay.

Notice the beam holding the mechanism up. It's a bunch of legos pegged together, and used to be the frame of Electrode. It was reused! The beam is held up by a ring stand, so we don't have to worry about it falling over... Though the weight of Electrode makes the beam bend a little.

                                         
A final view of the water pouring device. It pours water fine!

Several other issues without pictures:
I soldered some pennies onto the wires for the control box. Now, instead of touching the pointer to a wire, you touch the penny instead. It didn't change any of the resistance values

Charizard's arm was too large for the mechanism to move, so we downsized. Instead of the laser cut piece being the center of the arm and then being held onto a lego piece via a screw and nuts, we used only lego pieces as its center. 

Day 21 and 22: the rebuilding of motion modules and the beginnings of Charizard...

Instead of the confetti for a flame, Charizard is now supposed to stick out a flame. However, the original motion for that is extremely difficult to expand, as I discovered. Prof Berg suggested this motion module instead, because it can be easily expanded to reach further. Yay!

Picocricket program is now 100% functional! All computer aspects are completely done. The programs are rather long though, so I will not post them

We've begun to build Electrode and Charizard... Through many, many trials.

Our electrode seems to be faring well with wire wrapped around a frame. Luckily, spheres are decently trivial to create. Illustrator easily creates circles, so the frame was simple. (This process actually involved a great deal more confusion than this implies. Hot glue was necessary.)

Charizard is not faring as well. After many attempts at frames for the body, we've given up. Charizard now has a box for a body. Its head is completely laser cut and hot glued together... And then we realized that the motion for the flame actually curves out in an arc instead of straight! After many trials, we settled for the sweeping motion, because of lack of other options.

Day 19 and 20: refining the program and the arena/controller

We taped up the arena, so it looks very pretty now: it's mainly poster board, so it's very light. Hopefully, light enough to be hung easily.

The controller is slightly problematic at the moment. When the picocricket and the scratchboard are both attached, the resistance both sense is not at maximum, even when the pointer isn't touching anything. It still gives distinct resistances though, so I just coded around it.

Our Scratch program is completely functional! Yay! Picocricket is semi functional: it works but is really inelegant. After a move, it will just emit 0s until another move is touched. It's just not an elegant way to code!