Team Seven/Journal

Day 1

We went to lecture and discussed the game, parts, lab rules, etc. After the first lecture, we discussed our overall scoring strategy, and the robot functions that would be required to implement this strategy. Whiteboard sketches were drawn, erased, drawn, erased, etc. Parts were tallied, and it seems we'll be well within the number of sensor points allotted. We talked about an arm design we wanted to use and how it would handle trying to score in different towers and over the wall. We'll try to CAD something up tonight to finalize the configuration of components. For our software, we'll be sketching out our state machine to help us figure out what modules need to be written.

Lab:

We put together the Pegbot, and coded up some basic control code for the Arduino. Then we found out there were different voltage regulators, and we had neglected to check the specs... costing us one melted voltage regulator. We couldn't figure out why the motors weren't working at all.

Post-Lab:

As it turns out, two of the pins on the Arduino Mega weren't working at all, so we switched up the pins we used, and now the robot moves! Hooray for movement! We've also set up the GitHub repo, and are now working on the second checkpoint and planning our state transitions.

Day 2

Today we tested sensors and webcam inputs, and refined our wall avoidance code a bit before getting the second checkpoint. We also finished the high level software planning, with all the state transitions and more or less listed the functions that needed to be implemented. Some parts of the robot were also drawn up in CAD.