Week 7

This week, not much progress was made in the project. I was focused on the two papers that were due last week. I made a presentation with my team about our current progress, our project description and each of our roles. I was glad that we were able to reunite with the mobile development team to discuss a little bit about our progresses. We sent them our presentation so that they will have some general idea about what we want to do and the type of information we would like to send to the podcars from the app.

Although my team and I were mostly busy with the papers, I did some brief research about RFIDs and ultrasonic sensors. I wanted to gain some knowledge on how they work and what applications these sensors are usually for. RFID uses radio frequencies to store an ID that could be used to identify an object or status of an object. The downside to using this sensor is that we could only store very little information and the information holder (card or tag) would need to be in close proximity to the sensor. My team and I have determined that the minimum distance we need to acquire to have accurate and precise readings was about 1/2 an inch. We also discovered that if the podcar were to be moving fast, the reading might not be caught by the reader. We would either have to run it at the speed it can accurately and precisely read it or slow the podcar down as it approaches a checkpoint. For RFID, we are only concerned about identifying the podcars so large amounts of information will not be stored in the card or tag and that information will be sent through Xbee to the main system.

As far as determining when the switching should take place, the current magnets on the podcar or smaller magnets will be used to determine this. There will be two magnet readers mounted on either side of the podcar where it will read a magnet that will be placed on the track. Depending on what side the magnet is with respect to the track, switching will occur in accordance to the relative position of the magnet. There will be some magnets where the podcar will have to make a decision depending on where its destination is marked.

For ultrasonic sensors, they use sonar to determine distance by producing sound waves that are bounced back by an object and the sensor determines the distance. We are still discussing the acceptable range we want the podcars to be away from each other. We would have to look at the code from last year's team and determine what their distance was and how they determined it.

For this coming week, we will begin developing the code and get Processing or something similar to work so that we can create a successful prototype. We will also look at what hardware we have and will need to order to complete our design. We have a lot of work to do and I am just hoping we are successful by the end of this semester.