VEX IQ Combination Safe

Recently, I was experimenting with the VEX IQ Championship Kit. The reason is that I will soon be joining a competition team, and I need all the practice I can get. Instead of just building random projects, I decided to make something useful: a combination safe for my sweets. Not only does it keep candy safe from my parents, but it also keeps it safe from me when I am tempted to grab a snack.

Building the safe was actually the easy part. The harder challenge was writing the program that would make it work. I needed the safe to recognize the correct combination, which meant the program had to keep track of the motor’s position. It also had to remember the previous position and detect when the motor changed direction. Getting all of these pieces to work together took a lot of testing and debugging.

You can find my program on this GitHub link.

Although the programming was difficult at times, it was worth it when everything finally worked. Seeing the safe unlock after entering the correct combination felt very rewarding. It also showed me that even a simple idea can become an interesting challenge once you start figuring out how to make it work.