Team Five/Journal
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* Test omniwheel drive and control code | * Test omniwheel drive and control code | ||
* Test mapping and vision on the field? | * Test mapping and vision on the field? | ||
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| + | == Day 11: Jan 19 == | ||
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| + | We broke a couple more motor controllers. Hopefully they will be the last. | ||
Revision as of 01:01, 20 January 2012
Contents |
Pre IAP
We met in person before winter break to discuss organizational/meta-level stuff.
(sleepy, may fill in later)
Day 1: Jan 9
Gary looked into the OpenCV libraries and worked on vision code.
Amanda and Tim assembled the pegbot, and Anthony got a basic drive program running, completing Checkpoint 1. This took longer than expected due to electrical problems that mysteriously went away after some tinkering, and problems with the stock Arduino command decoder that wouldn't allow the motors to be driven backward.
We met and decided on the general mechanical design of the robot, agreeing to prototype scoring mechanisms but mostly leaning toward a dumper/launcher. We also decided how to spend our sensor points and what we intended to order online (most notably omni-wheels).
Gary and Tim took the pegbot and eeePC home to work on Checkpoint 2 with a bump sensor.
Day 2: Jan 10
Before lab, Tim ordered omni-wheels and obtained motors and other parts from MITERS.
Amanda, Tim, and Anthony discussed mechanical design. Amanda prototyped a catapult mechanism and Tim did CAD, finishing the base, sensor ring, and drive train setup and hoping to finish the chassis and catapult at home. He claims he's getting better at it so it'll go faster tomorrow.
Anthony worked on Checkpoint 2 and general code structure, while Gary continued to work on vision and ball recognition, working toward Checkpoint 4. Amanda started looking into IR sensor setup.
More electrical problems.
Day 3: Jan 11
Right after lecture, we talked about strategy and software architecture and came up with a general plan for robot behavior, involving memorizing ball locations using odometry.
Tim continued CADing. Gary worked on ball recognition code (todo: image library) and started working with mouse odometry. Amanda troubleshooted electrical problems. Anthony began calibrating the short range IR and ran into problems with sensor readings being wildly inconsistent, possibly due to electrical connection problems.
Agenda for tomorrow:
- Finish(?) CAD
- Fix electrical problems and calibration
- Implement some state machine logic
- Checkpoints 2 and 4
- Begin fabrication?
Day 4: Jan 12
Amanda and Anthony troubleshooted the Arduino and found out that our ground was not actually connected to ground, which explained some of our problems. Amanda resoldered the board. Anthony updated arduino.py, started to work on state machine logic, and ran off to party with Manic Sages. Gary played around with vision and multiprocessing and debugged the updated arduino.py. Tim continued to work on CADing.
More unidentified problems with the board cropped up. We haven't been able to check off the checkpoints, though we do have the code ready at least for Checkpoints 2 and 4.
Agenda for tomorrow and over the weekend:
- Yell at the Arduino until it works
- Outline general code structure
- Checkpoints 2 and 4
- Fabrication
Day 5: Jan 13
Tim continued CADing and talked with Jamie (from staff) to try to fix electrical problems. The motor controller started smoking, which was not a good sign. We discovered that one of our motors only had 6 ohms of resistance, and probably fried both the motor controller and its replacement. Hour and a half later, the bot still won't move.
Anthony and Gary sketched out a diagram of software architecture. We're going to have a Mapping process that takes vision and odometry input to compute and update relative ball positions. We also decided to have a thread continually updating sensor values from the Arduino so that we don't have to wait for serial communication all the time. Anthony rewrote arduino.py, hopefully for the final time, to accomplish the latter. Gary debugged his vision and odometry code, did vision calibration, and began to work with two mice.
Tim went to MITERS to finish CADing and start building.
Agenda for tomorrow:
- Ask Sam to yell at the Arduino until it works
- Create software modules that don't exist yet (Control, Mapping)
- Checkpoints
- Build
Day 6: Jan 14
Not much happened in lab today; Gary and Anthony were at Mystery Hunt and Tim was sleeping after building all night.
Gary reports that two-mouse odometry works well. We debugged the new arduino interface. Tim set to work on building a drive base for us to work on.
Agenda:
- Omniwheel drive
- Have a bot that can approach balls on Tuesday
Day 7: Jan 15
Tim finished a rough omniwheel drive base to program on. Gary improved vision processing speed by orders of magnitude by using Cython.
Other than that, not much going on. Hunt wrap-up. We would like to have lab open tomorrow.
Agenda in lab tomorrow:
- Omniwheel drive
- Ball collection (both software and mechanical)
Day 8: Jan 16
Implemented omniwheel drive, in theory, as well as handling multiple motor controllers. Wasn't able to test it because electrical problems. Sam helped us debug it all day, not much luck. Gary wrote a UI for vision calibration.
Day 9: Jan 17
Tried to get robot working for Mock 1. Electronics worked intermittently and then stopped working again. Blew a few fuses and took a 0 on the mock. Got a new Arduino and resoldered it, still running into problems. Refactored code. Started implementing mapping and closed-loop control.
Agenda for tomorrow:
- Everything
Day 10: Jan 18
Gary filled in implementation details in the software. Tim and Anthony got electronics working, hopefully for good. Tim went off to solder the connections down and work on build.
Agenda:
- Test omniwheel drive and control code
- Test mapping and vision on the field?
Day 11: Jan 19
We broke a couple more motor controllers. Hopefully they will be the last.
