Team Two/Journal

Star Date: 1/10/2012

It is the second day of MasLab. Checkpoint one should have been finished last night, but our MC was not cooperating with us. After it was soldered into our Arduino shield properly (checked ever connection a hundred times) it failed to function in any way. It didn't even idle properly. Both RX and TX values on the MC were being held high when they should ave been communicating. The green LED blinked at a rate about twice as high as it should have been in idle and it never output any voltage on the motor outputs. Will talk to MasLab instructors for more information.

Leading theories (not in any specific order): 1. Software issue 2. Hardware issue

I think that about covers everything.

Week 2 Notes:

John Rom and Blair are still working on the finalized design of the robot and therefore us coders have been spending more quality time with our pegbot this week. The coding has been divided so that PJ and Rob work on behavior and Brad on Vision. As of now, our pegbot can move about in various directions, avoid walls, and move towards red balls. Pegbot was entered as our robot for mock competition 1.

Week 3 Notes:

The final bits of the robot are still being designed. Pegbot is still being played with. Coders are working on having the robot recognize yellow. We did not enter a robot for the second mock competition.

Week 4 Notes:

Deadline is getting uncomfortably close and we have finally taken apart pegbot and have begun to run code on our final robot (name to be determined). The robot was put together in a minimal fashion such that it can move about with the foam spinners spinning. We were unable to really test the code before entering the robot in the seeding competition. Because of that, we didn't even run the robot as a state machine. Instead, we just utilized a single function that drove towards balls and stopped after three minutes. Luckily, the code was not too buggy and we were able to secure 4th seed for the competition despite not having a launching mechanism or even a queue. The foam spinners actually work very well at sucking up balls.

The day before impoundment has finally approached and our robot, which we have just named Rufus McNasty III, still does not have a launcher or a queue. It looks like John Rom has an all nighter machining ahead of him. He'll have company from us coders however, since the code is still at about 40% complete. While we know that our robot can find red, we still need to program it to follow walls, find yellow, and launch balls, before combining them all as an overarching state machine.

It is about 4 am now and our robot still is not complete. We can successfully follow walls, but there seems to be something wrong with the vision code. It appears as though the robot is recognizing white as also being yellow. Hopefully we can fix this before impoundment.

It's 6 am and John Rom has finally machined the launcher onto the robot. He is now working on making a stand for the servos which will be driving the launcher. Rob and I (PJ) are staying up coding, we have written a state machine combining all of the states, but since we don't have a finalized robot, there's not much we can do. John Rom has actually taken one of the motors out in order to fix an acrylic piece of the robot, so we can't even drive forward at the moment.

9am. John Rom finished the launcher. It now works. We still need a ball queue for the robot, but before doing that John Rom is reworking all of our wires in a much cleaner way. We coders are heavily anticipating a robot to run code with.

2pm. Just eaten lunch. Last stand now. Finishing up the code, but we still seem to be having trouble locating yellow. Can't really run the state machine yet though since we don't have a ball queue..

5pm. Having trouble trying to install final servo for the ball queue. Just realized it was an error in the code, spent about an hour and a half realizing why no ports we plugged in to were not working. Ball queue still not complete.

8pm. John Rom has finally completely finished machining Rufus. Rob and I now have two hours in order to test and debug find yellow and our state machine code.

10pm. Just impounded. We were never able to completely go through a 3 min trial. But state machine code does not seem too buggy, but it neither seems like it will work 100%. Rufus still has trouble recognizing yellow, but I don't think he'll reach that point in 3 minutes tomorrow. My prediction is he will just drive around collecting balls and will never move toward the find yellow state.