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. This fixed our problem and now, once the podcar receives its directions, it doesn't matter how many times you press "Request Pod," it will do that trip once.

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