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

Lecture today was about robot behaviors and sensors. We found that while Hans is able to code up some pretty nice localization software, localizing himself in MIT is an issue. A clipboard with an algorithm written down to localize oneself on campus was suggested. Results of this experiment will be noted at the end of MASLab.

In lab, 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.

Day 3

Today's morning lecture was about vision, and afternoon lab time was about beating our heads against the computer trying to get vision to work. Victor spent 2 hours trying to recognize quadrilaterals. Hosea spent 3 hours trying to point at corners. We also realized that pentagons are strange, and sometimes, they are actually quadrilaterals in disguise. On the mechanical side of things, we found that the little laptop isn't really so little. It's actually rather large. We shall have to be clever about housing it properly. We should probably get to machining things soon.

Along the way, we also got our first design review checkoff done by demonstrating that we can draw, use calendars, twiddle with threads, and think about playing games. We also got the encoder software working, and tested it by waving things in front if it. It should probably work when used with actual wheels. For this bit, we decided to have encoder plates with holes in them and use a photosensor instead of messing around with coupling rotary encoders to our wheels. These should work better.

And there was CADing, and coding long into the night. And there was evening, and there was morning- the third day.