Team Four/Journal
Day One
Today is one of those days where everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. In lab we promptly shorted out our battery (luckily we had properly hooked up the fuse) and right before finishing code for checkpoint two we accidentally plugged something somewhere it wasn't supposed to go and released the magic blue smoke from our motor controller. ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ ┻━┻
The end of the day is starting to look up though. We have most of the critical modules of our robot SoldidWorksed, as of right now we're in the process of adding in the specifics such motor mounts and standoffs. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow we will have everything finalized so we can cut out the relevant parts out of acrylic in Edgerton. We found these amazing motors that fulfill all of the requirements for operating our hopper and ball collection system, and put in an order for it. It should arrive sometime between Friday and Wednesday.
Tomorrow aside from lecture we plan on replacing our motor control and getting checkpoint two to work before leaving. I am also going to Edgerton to get training so I can use their laser cutter.
Day Two
Today was much better than the day before. We got our power cable re-soldered to the switches make sense, making it impossible to short out our board like we did the day before. Lesson learned. Q(^_^Q ) After a little fiddling with our code we finally got our checkpoint two to work. It turned out our bump sensor needed a pull down resistor, because otherwise it was acting as an antenna and every time one of us got close to the robot it activated the switch, which gave the appearance that the code wasn't working. Just goes to show you all the small things you don't really consider while soldering up electronics that can really mess you up. We'll be twice as vigilant in the future.
At our meeting tonight we got our strategy and mechanical design mostly flushed out. Our cad model is coming along, and if we get our t-bolting to work the first time we can have a completed robot base within the next two days! ;) We also got a jump start on playing with vision code, however no significant progress has been made so far.
