Team Five/Journal

Pre IAP

We met in person before winter break to discuss organizational/meta-level stuff.

sleepy, will 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, focusing on Checkpoint 4. Amanda started looking into wiring up an IR sensor.

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.

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 troubleshooted the Arduino, identified an electrical problem, and resoldered the board. Gary worked on vision code some more. Anthony updated arduino.py and started to work on state machine logic. I'm not sure what Tim did.

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.

Agenda for tomorrow and over the weekend:

• Yell at the Arduino until it works
• Checkpoints 2 and 4
• Lay down general code structure
• Fabrication