Team Five/Journal
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, 4, and 5.
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 input from mouse and camera to compute and update relative ball positions. We also decided to have a thread continually updating sensor values so that we don't have to wait for them all the time. Anthony rewrote arduino.py to accomplish the latter. Gary debugged his vision and odometry code, 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
