Team Nine/Journal
Contents |
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.
