Team Four/Journal
Week 1
Electrical
The electrical design of this robot is fairly simply. It consists of two distinct wiring setups, one to transfer power and the other to transfer data. The wiring for the power transfer consists a 4-cell LiPo battery, two DC-DC converters, and two motor controllers. The DC-DC converters drop the [roughly] 16 volts from the battery to 8 volts needed for the Intel Edison and the 5 volts needed for sensor logic. The motor controllers are wired directly into the battery and supply the motors with power. The second wiring setup is for data transfer. This wiring is also very simple and consists data inputs from the multiple sensors on board. In order to keep our wiring organized we created our own plugs and labeled all of the wires.
Mechanical
The mechanical side of the first week also consisted of two separate parts. The beginning of the week was spent learning how to use the shop (including the laser cutter and 3D printers) and building the kit-bot. The kit-bot was given to us by the MASLAB staff and gives the software team a moving platform to work on while the final design is being created. This gives both the mechanical and software teams more time to create a better design.
Software
Software is kewl