Week 4

This past week, we were able to sort out any confusions we had left and we all decided to have a meeting of all of the 1/12th scale subteams to make sure what each one of us was doing. We wanted to see how each subteam was approaching their problem and coming up with solutions so that our designs and other subteams' designs will agree with each other. I am relieved to know that our 1/12th scale team will not have much of a problem in terms of communication between subteams because we established a way so that we can all communicate with each other and at the same time uploading files so that all subteams have access to those files. We decided to use Slack as a way of communication outside of class and the Google Drive as a way of sharing files within the team. We also addressed a common goal of at least achieving 5 podcars running on the track by the end of the academic year.

I was able to download the Processing software that last year's team used to control a podcar from a remote location. From my basic understanding, the software is similar to Arduino IDE in the sense that we can program the same way we do in Arduino but there are other unique capabilities that are available in the Processing software such as color selector, creating fonts, and movie maker. You can also run Java scripts on this software. I was also able to look at last year's code that was used to control the bogie. Based on the code, I saw that there is some familiar code that deals with Xbee usage. I became familiar with using Xbees from a previous project that I worked in during my ME 106 class. I also saw the various lines of code used to determine when the podcar should stop based on the ultrasonic sensor and the lines of code that were responsible for switching the mechanism on the bogie based on the barcodes on the track. Unfortunately, the barcode sensing idea will be removed and will be replaced with a more robust and efficient method that might be along the lines of using magnetic encoders to track the position of a podcar and also determine when it should change the orientation of the bogie mechanism.

In the coming week, I plan to understand more of the code and also start to replicate what was achieved last year by also implementing our idea. We want to be able to control the bogie with the Processing software and also by running the code on a bogie to see how it works. Presently, I will only focus on increasing my knowledge of how the code works and start manipulating the code so that we can implement the magnetic encoder idea.