Team Four/Journal
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1/6
No batteries ;( What do? Zzz Going over lecture = going over competition. HEY LETS GO FOR COLLECTING BALLS YES? :D
No electronics hooked up yet, but kitbot base mechanically works.
Ubuntu has been force fed onto our slate, opencv 2.4.8 compiled, and the CV stuff we have already is running on it with the on-board rear camera.
No work on actual electronics yet.
1/7
2/3 team sick, 1/3 busy. We got a battery and made most of the connectors we need for kitbot. We have the Maple IDE working on two of our computers, and we're trying to get the maple libraries to work for our own makefiles, instead of the stupidly complicated ones that ship with libmaple.
Being sick is really not helping things.
Connecting to botclient is unbelievably simple. We'll probably spin off a process for every image we want to save, so the main system won't be hung up by the client or disk writes, if any are needed. It might be worth spinning off a process that writes out the image, then having a python daemon pick it up for simplicity (C and json is a bit of a pain). A ramdisk is easily fast enough to be used for passing images between processes, the SSD in the tablet might be too.
Reading sensor data for tomorrow's checkoff will probably be pretty trivial with the Maple IDE or libmaple toolchain, but it'd be nice to have sensors working outside of those two things, since both are a pain.
1/8
2/3 of our team has healed, 1/3 ?!?
Today in lecture we learned how to make an LED "Le broken" and how to sober up robots.
Maple programmed with a tiny thing that listens to serial and controls the motors based on input. We flailed at the short range digital distance sensors for a while and couldn't get them to ever detect anything close to them. Tried providing 3.3v from Maple, grounded to Maple, and scoped output. No reaction, the sensor always put out 3.3v on it's output. Very confusing
We also got our check-off whoo.
1/9
2/3 of us are getting magical laser training, 1/3 cadding "base and shit"
Aisha watched people talk about computer vision, Alex was like "lol imma not using that Java"
Aisha's tired today, got a safe battery connector thingy, and learned about MapleIDE and Solidworks.
Team making progress towards check-off tomorrow.
We're trying to figure out what the best mechanism for lifting balls is. Spiral, belt, or something else. The inability to just dump balls onto the top of the reactor is a pain. Whose bright idea was the overhang on the reactors?
Hooked gyroscope up, it definitely looks like it's working but needs some time for calibration. Made battery connector to lower the chance that we'll electrocute ourselves. Forgot switch, need to splice that in somewhere.
1/12
Messed around with CAD
1/13
Discussing strategy, considering switching to making a robot that can reliably put balls into the bottoms of reactors and ignoring everything else. We could make a relatively fast robot with easily accessible electronics for debugging. Tiny-ness of robot would also lend itself well to breaking ties.
We've settled on a robot which purely moves green balls into the bottoms of reactors. We're completely ignoring trying to lift balls off the ground. The idea is to reliably collect green balls and get them into reactors, aiming for the points per unique reactor with a ball in it. By ditching all tall elements of our robot, we can hopefully have a faster and lighter robot, for moving more green balls and winning any tie breaking.
1/14
New strategy, two sides to put in balls of different colors. Other things are the same, multiple levels, 2nd for tablet, 3rd for electronics.
1/15
Worked on CAD, computer vision, sensors.
1/16
Worked on CAD, other things. Jwu sighting.
