Team Three/Journal

Revision as of 22:59, 9 January 2014

Day 1: Mon, Jan 6th

Team Roles: MechE - Vincent, Kath, Melody

Coding - Angel, Matt

For our first day, we built the Kit Bot out of the parts given in the lab so that our coders could begin playing with the software.

Our team started meeting over winter break to get a head start because most of us have other IAP obligations (mainly, UPOP and UROPs). We started bandying ideas around after looking through past wiki's, and CADed half of the robot. We ordered some supplies over break (and asked Ariel a lot of questions), but are still missing some.

Currently, we plan to finish CADing today. We also need to get MDF for the body of our robot ASAP, once we find a way to get to Home Depot...

Day 2: Tues, Jan 7th

When working on getting the Kit Bot to move today, we discovered that the set screw in the Kit Bot's hub was loosened. Unfortunately, the wiring was reversed so the bot drove the other way from intended.

Unfortunately, we haven't yet finished CADing our robot, but we're hoping to be able to start prototyping parts tomorrow if supplies come in :) (Namely, the rubber band roller, ramp, and anything else we have time for.)

Melody and Kath attended the SolidWorks tutorial, while Vincent got trained in laser cutting. We've signed up to get further shop and laser cutter-trained tomorrow.

Later in the night, we got the color sensor to work with the Arduino. However, we ran into problems using the Maple for the color sensor since the method pulseIn was implemented for the Arudino, but not the Maple.

In the meanwhile, the tablet got flung a couple of times since there were issues with the motor controller...

Day 3: Wed, Jan 8th

Now that both Melody and Kath finished their 2.670 shop training course, the whole team could attend the morning's lectures on the physics of the robot and PID.

Angel continued working on getting the Kit Bot to be fully functional - we replaced the faulty motor controller and things worked out a lot better.

Melody and Kath got shop and laser-cutter trained at the IDC (thanks to Charles!) so that we can finally start cutting things down to the right sizes we want.

We prototyped a conveyor belt mechanism to transport the balls up, but without extra parts that we didn't want to deal with, we realized that it wouldn't be strong enough to hold up the balls. Therefore, we decided to make a screw after all, which we had initially ruled out - over the weekend, perhaps?

On the bright side, we laser-cut the parts needed for the rubber band roller and turned a rod down to the right size to start prototyping the rubber band roller tomorrow.

Our Kit Bot can now successfully distinguish between whether a ball is red or green and start to drive towards it!

Day 4: Thurs, Jan 9th

On the software side, we worked on tracking the ball better and getting the gyro to work, as well as edge detection of the walls.

In other news, we got the rubber band roller to work! We had to make a few simple modifications to our original design in order for the ball to never get stuck, but it seems to work great now. (knock on wood)

We've also spent a good chunk of the day creating drawings getting ready to do a next round of laser cutting and mechanism prototyping. Because the lab isn't stocked with angle brackets, we made our own.