Team Nine/Journal

Revision as of 19:00, 3 February 2012

Team 9 Journal

Sensors 4 IR 16 1 Drive Motor 7 1 Stock Motor 5

TOTAL 28

Day 1: January 9

Yeaaaaa!!!! The first day of Maslab!!! One of our team members had to drop out because of an overload of work :( but we toughed that out, and had an early meeting at 10am (This is early for me...(Oh yea this is Isaac!)). We discussed kind of the general design of the robot, and what our strategy would be to capture balls. We decided to try to shoot balls over the wall and past the purple line for maximum points. We pretty much thought it would take too much time and effort to shoot accurately into the green box. Our robot design looked a little like R2-D2!! XD In general, we would run over the balls, and suck them up into our hopper (ball holder) inside our robot using rollers. Then the balls would be shot out from the rotating head at a high speed using rollers.

Then we went to lecture, and learned some stuff about the what Maslab is, the rules, and a bunch of other Maslab things. Later, we went into lab, obtained our box, opened it, and stared in awe. For the longest time, we were trying to figure out how to use all the things that were in the box. Hans went off and went solder crazy. Staphany and I stared at the parts trying to use our ESP to make the parts build themselves into our robot. When we found out that didnt work, we stuck things together using logical methodology.

Day 2: January 10

After we had gotten the bare bones of our pegbot together, the next checkpoint was to have pegbot autonomously turn away from a wall; however, issues with delay on the arduino prevented us from making much progress. Today's lecture discussed vision and threading - we tried to incorporate threading into our wall-avoiding code, but the lagging arduino prevented us from being able to test the code. We used svn to facilitate code updating and sharing, which was exciting since I never knew such a thing existed (Staphany).

Day 3: January 11

We had our first meeting with Sam and another team to review our schedules and mechanical/strategical design. After the departure of our MechE team mate, none of us knew how to use solidworks, so we showed our 'roller-full' design on pen and paper. Our mechanical design was meant to maximize ball-carrying capacity, speed, and throwing-strength - a few of the characteristics we felt were most important toward our strategical goal of gaining 5 points per ball past the purple line. Continued problems with the arduino stopped us from completing yesterday's checkpoint.

Day 4: January 12

The arduino refuses to work; even with continued updates from Sam and other teams, we could not get it to operate the IR sensors. One issue was that sometimes the arduino would change its port number on its own. Yesterday's lecture talked about mapping and localization - topics covered extensively in 6.01 - but the team felt that mapping out the field would be impressive, but perhaps, overkill. We began to explore openCV libraries to attempt today's checkpoint: turn and drive toward a ball. None of us having had experience with openCV, however, this task continues to elude us for the time being.

Day 5: January 13

It's friday, friday, arduinos don't work on friday.... Just beginning to research openCV, we realize that it has some of the worst documentation for python users. Even figuring out how to download the correct files is a hassle; Isaac couldn't get it to work on a Mac, but luckily Staphany is awesome and uses Ubuntu, so we were able to test some basic functions just to see that it works at all. We haven't even plugged in the webcam yet, so the next checkpoint of camera calibration is an amusing thought.

Day 6: January 14

Finally the weekend has arrived, but we've only just begun. Hans is figuring out our CAD model on solidworks, Isaac is working on the arduino, and Staphany is going through fields of poorly documented openCV python bindings. It looks as though our inexperience and small numbers are dragging us down, causing us to spend a good chunk of our time just familiarizing ourselves with basic tasks. But at least we've acquired some critical building skills, such as soldering!

Day 7: January 15

Everyone is continuing to work on the tasks of yesterday. Solidworks is tedious as it crashes very often, especially when Hans attempts to rotate his model. The arduino is continuing to be ridiculous and Staphany is beginning to see just how evil openCV is in python. The willowgarage online documentation has different sites for C++ and for python, but there appear to be 2 versions for python. Unsure of what the differences are between the 2 versions, Staphany tries both and finds that importing the 'cv' library always works, and importing the 'cv2' library almost never works. So imagine how happy she is to find that cv2 is the more updated and comprehensive library. That, was sarcasm right there. So much. Sarcamsm.

Day 8: January 16

A week has passed, and we are deep into the coding and CADing, but have not yet put out any parts for our final robot. Hans is nearly done with the CAD model, however, so soon, Isaac will be able to start cutting our parts. Staphany has begun stringing together some openCV image processing functions to convert the RGB images captured by the webcam into HSV, in order to filter out all colors but red. The openCV online documentation flaunts many tempting functions for ball identification, and the internet reveals that red ball detection is a common project that has been completed successfully, though mostly in C++.