Week 6 - Small Scale Controls

This week the team has been focused on getting the Xbee module to communicate to an Arduino. Because we have the RFID figured out, understanding the Xbee is the last thing that needs to be accomplished in order to write a fully functional navigation code. To do this, we have contacted the previous team in an attempt to solve the problems we are having. They gave us some tips to get us started on the Xbee troubleshooting and we will be scheduling a meeting in the near future if we are unable to get the module to work.

In addition, we are working to get narrow down the components that we would like to use as well as learning how to use them effectively.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 30 - Final presentation and Maker Faire

Our final presentation took place on Friday, 5/11/18, and is included below: The entire Maker Faire event took place from Thursday to Sunday, 5/17 - 5/20. Thursday morning was for setting up and testing. Ben was able to attend and make sure everything was running smoothly. One of the track supports had to be removed so we also removed a station. Other than that, everything was going smoothly. On Friday, Ben and Coby went to Maker Faire and for the entire duration of the day, they were able to have at least one podcar running at a time, while the others would be taken off intermittently for small tweaks. After the event, there was free food and beer available for all the Makers. Coby and Andi attended Maker Faire on Saturday, and throughout the day, there were at least one or two podcars running at one time. We eventually were able to have all three running relatively successfully. One ultrasonic sensor had to be swapped out because the pod kept stopping randomly and as the day
Read more

Week 16 - Lightning Talks and Planning

This week, we presented our lightning talk as well as watched the other group's talks. This gave us much needed insight as to the overall progress and future of our projects. We then solidified our budget and we are now able to begin ordering parts. However, we will most likely wait a couple of weeks so that we are sure exactly what we need to order. In the coming weeks, we will be finalizing our parts list and then ordering the parts. At the same time, we will be learning processing language and testing the viability of other languages. We will begin construction our controls systems in the next few weeks.
Read more

Week 28 - Bugs and Discovery Channel

In this week's session, we continued testing and refinement of our code. We were also told that the Discovery Channel is coming in next week (5/9/18) to film the Spartan Superway project while we are all testing and preparing for Maker Faire. When sending directions via the GUI, we came across a previously unnoticed bug. After requesting the pod to go to station 12, we noticed that the notification LED would turn blue (as expected) but once the pod reached the station, it would stop, then the LED would light blue again and the pod would go around the track and stop again at station 12. We realized that the problem was because the Serial port remained open after we requested a podcar. Because of this, the request would go through as many times as we pressed the "Request Pod" button on the GUI. To fix this, we simply closed the serial port after a request had been taken in by the Arduino, and opened the port back up after the podcar reached its requested destination. Th
Read more