Team Eleven/Journal
From Maslab 2013
Contents |
Day 1 Jan 7
It's the first day of wonderful and beautiful IAP and with it came the kick off of Maslab. Team ll is comprised of two froshlings, Yanni and Valentina, and their upstairs neighbor and Junior member, Charles. For most of the team it was their first full day back home, and it began with a long and convoluted walk exclusively indoors to the meeting room (seeing as one of the members was recovering from a cold and didn't want to be outside). During the meeting, the competition task was explained and the merry Christmas themed tubs were handed out.
After civilly discussing who would keep what of the materials at the end of the competition, we began work on the peg bot. We set up the arduino code to receive command codes from the computer. The command system is setup so that the computer can send a code and parameters over serial to the robot. The supported commands added today were set forward and backwards speed. For checkoff one, we had the computer send varying speed commands that made the robot move back and forth.
Problems: the right motor is not moving properly. Will check it's setup later
Day 2 Jan 8
Today we experimented with the IR sensor, but could not get it to work reliably outside of a 3in range between 3 and 6 inches. Will work on this tomorrow. Temporary limit switches were added to the front of the pegbot for checkoff 2. A debounce class was added for digital reads. New commands are now supported by the arduino code, the ability to get limit switch info and to set the speed of the left and right motor separately.
Day 3 Jan 9
Today we mostly worked on preparing the deliverables for the checkoff. Most importantly, we decided what design we want to go with and have a scale detailed drawing of it. We also made some progress with the vision code. Some proto code was written that we used to find balls in the sample image. The arduino code was also edited to move motor control into a class to reduce repeated code.
Day 4 Jan 10
Today was not a good day. Not enough was accomplished. We needed to have some preliminary ball recognition running today to pass checkoff 4, but we were unable to get it up and running before lab closed. Using opencv, we plan to filter for color using HSB values, then use blob detection to find the appropriate ball. We also made a cardboard model of our robot today. The model has shown that our design is weak in a few areas. For one, there is not much storage space, and the entire thing is on the small side. This is due to our attempt to design it so that it can turn in place in any position on the map. The general design is fine, but it may have to be scaled slightly differently. Some good news, base code for the main controller and state machine have been hammered out, along with our custom arduino communication. Adding states and behaviors should not be difficult.
Day 5 Jan 11
As for today, we are making headway on the checkpoint today but focusing more on the work that needs to be done on our final design. Especially after yesterday's disappointments, we need to pull ourselves together. At the moment we are trying to make heads or tails on the encoder as well as other features of the bot's programming.
