Team Ten/Journal

Revision as of 23:46, 25 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 8: Jan 16 2012

Motor controller stopped working :(

Day 9: 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 10: 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?

We had a lot of trouble with our short-range IR sensors not working. After much sadness and frustration, we discovered that our long-range sensor worked fine, and our board wasn't shorting (whew!). We got a third short-range sensor and that worked too. So was it just coincidence that the first two failed? Who knows, but everything seems to be working now. We were also trying to use an optical mouse instead of encoders for localization, but one of us got really excited and broke it (it wasn't me, I swear!... okay, it was me). We'll get there. Eventually.

Day 11: Jan 19 2012

We fiddled with vision code and were mystified somewhat. I blame the sushi. Reality-Check still needs building, but it'll have to wait until tomorrow so Daivon and Veronica can get into Edgerton and work their magic.

Day 12: Jan 20 2012

A bunch of stuff happened today! Bearings came in the mail, RC has more pieces lying around, and ghetto-bot follows walls (and I even got opencv to do stuff for me!). Successes on all four fronts. There was an interesting lecture today about cool robots that could one day kill you in your sleep. A less optimistic team would fear the robot armageddon is upon us, but hope is what we're made of. And carbon. And water. and...

Day 15: Jan 23 2012

Mock #2 today! Unfortunately, we had some last minute problems... with everything... :P But we remain steadfast in our conviction that hope conquers all. Well, that and a fully functioning robot. Off to the lab!

Day 16: Jan 24 2012

Today we got free dinner and mingled with potential employers. Good times. I got opencv to pick out sharp blue things for me. I'm confident that it'll be an amazing wall-finding/image-filtering program by the time spring semester ends... In other news, Eben continued to fight the good fight against the Arduino and it's nefarious C++ code. If there ever was a role for a coding ninja who worked in the shadows to keep everything together, I'm pretty sure Eben would be that guy. I wonder if he'd wear a ninja outfit if I bought one for him. I sure hope he's not reading these journals... :D

Day 17: Jan 25 2012

Today we soldered and resoldered a bunch of things on our megashield. Trying to avoid spaghetti wiring is fun (really!) Daivon and Veronica went to Edgerton to prototype our rolling thing. I sure hope it works... I've still got to finish wiring the rest of our bump sensors, but I'm secretly afraid that I've become addicted to the sweet smell of melted solder. So delicious  :9