Team Ten/Journal

Revision as of 19:57, 18 January 2012

Day 1: Jan 9 2012

We assembled the pegbot and got it to run. The wheels spun in opposite directions because we didn't think about polarity hard enough. We also found that the installation of IDLE on the eeePC was kind of screwy for some reason.

Day 2: Jan 10 2012

We spent a lot of time getting the IR sensor to work. There seems to be a software issue that makes sending/receiving commands from the arduino really slow. Changing the timeout variable in arduino.py from 1 to 2 helped, sort of. Daivon and Veronica started CADding parts, and we thought about how to build a ball shooter.

Also, we've noticed that the wheels rotate at dramatically different speeds even though they're receiving the same motor value command. Still need to figure that out.

Day 3: Jan 11 2012

Eben made a discovery! The caster was causing our pegbot to drive unpredictably. We are are planning on using two omni-wheels instead of a caster. We need to prototype our ball-shooting mechanism so we can get to work on the real thing.

Day 4: Jan 12 2012

We realized that pygame is easier to use than opencv. Also we decided to put a skirt on the robot.

Day 6: Jan 14 2012

Wrote some new code to interface with the arduino. It's a lot simpler and faster.

Day 7: Jan 16 2012

Motor controller stopped working :(

Day 8: Jan 17 2012

Fortunately, the motor controller wasn't broken and we spent most of today (Mock competition 1!) straightening out uncooperative code and making our wiring less haphazard. We're still moving a bit slow, but we've got our baseboard cut! Yay progress!

Also, the mock was a little painful, but our team is made of indefatigable optimism (and astounding punctuality)  :)

Day 9: Jan 18 2012

Our omni-wheel arrived... pro tip: if you want a pair of omni-wheels, you should really check to make sure you order them in pairs :D

Also, omni-wheels are really expensive. Who knew?