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Team 10

Team Members

  • David Mayo - '17
  • Robert Goldie - Grad.
  • Jake Burga - '18
  • Alan Casallas - '17
updates made by Jake Burga and Alan Casallas

Day 0 - Mon, Jan 4: An Intro to MASLAB

This is the first day everyone on the team so far has actually met eachother. David and Alan just joined this weekend. We're all 6-3, which means that actually building the robot is going to be tricky, but hopefully getting it to actually things shouldn't be so hard.

We had a small reintroduction lecture to MASLAB at 10, and than discussed a little bit about future plans, but we still need to work on organization of tasks and things.

After that, I spent most of the time in the lab on my own. We didn't have any equipment yet, so it was mainly just to get safety training and familiarize us with the lab layout.

Rob has a baby, so he wasn't able to stick around for very long.

Mostly a slow start.

Day 1 - Tue, Jan 7: Something to work with.

We have equipment! (Or maybe that was yesterday) Mostly the control components. Motors, wheels, a microcontrol, a winbook tablet, a pretty large battery, and a teensy.

I spent most of today trying to figure out how to get the teensy to communicate with my computer. I could get to work on my Linux computer, but with out the proper libraries, and it would keep crashing on my windows machine. Also, the winbook won't stay on for very long.

Unfortunately, we don't have any real robot to work with still, but we're supposed to be able to print that by tomorrow. Alan is learning solid works, and has laser cutter access now.

Also, a already managed to break one of the motors... I was able to glue back together the plastic encasing that broke off the back side. It fortunately still works, but now has some nice red tape wrapped around it.

Day 2 - Wed, Jan 6: Stack Destroyer!

We have a working robot!!!

Well, at least the wheels can work.

David spent last night programming a way for his computer to communicate with ROS, his computer, and the teensy. We then assembled the robot Alan printed off last night. That was quite a bit of trial and error (mainly for trying to figure out how the motors attached to the frame).

Once we had that, we worked on being able to hook the power supply to the motor driver and consecutively to the teensy.

image

And we got the motors to spin, so success! We now have something to work with.

... We should probably do something about the mess of wires, though.

Day 3 - Thur, Jan 7: The robot strikes back!

We continue to struggle greatly. It turns out ROS doesn't work on the version of Linux that was installed on the Winbooks, so David will be installing an older version of Ubuntu on the tablets. Unfortunately, even before the installation, the tablet has been locking up, losing WiFi connection, and not cooperating with flash drives.

Jake and Alan finalized the design for the robot. It will sweep blocks underneath its body using the shape of its base, and then scoop the blocks using its hook arm all the way into a tower mean to hold the blocks. They are now working on Solidworks models.

Day 4 - Fri, Jan 8: Pizza Time

David continues to wrestle with the technical issues of the tablet. He succesfully loaded the Ubuntu installer onto the tablet after several restarts, but the letters appeared in Cherokee. Halfway through the installation, the tablet reported a 'kernel panic'...

Alan is working on CADing the second floor of the robot, but used the mechanical connection layout meant for the first floor, so he will have to correct that. Jake is building electrical connectors for the electrical system and Robert continues to familiarize himself with OpenCV and the Logitech webcam.

Next Steps

Our next steps are to finish the CAD model of the robot. We hope to have the robot printed out and constructed by Tuesday afternoon.

We desperatley need to get ROS up and running on the tablet. Once David finishes learning the Cherokee language, we'll have an ETA on that.