Week 8

This week, my team and I made more progress on the project than we have been able to in the past couple of weeks. The two papers that were due two weeks ago and the presentation that we gave two weeks ago took most of our time that we could have used on the project. Last week, we had a seminar on project report preparation which also limited our time at the shop. We have another presentation coming up and that might take up a little more time than we wanted to at this point in the semester. I am beginning to worry that we could not make much progress this month as much as we wanted to and that we are falling behind.

I did make a major breakthrough for our team. I was finally able to get Processing to work. For the past few weeks, I was so frustrated that I could not get Processing to work. I looked at the video that the Korean summer team had posted in the Archives and I downloaded all necessary libraries and looked for any documentation on how to get it to work. I finally looked at the video closely and tried to determine what sketches they had opened when they ran the program. That is when I downloaded the sketches and saved the library that is in the Archives to the Processing libraries folder. Unfortunately, I was not able to run it because I do not have the necessary hardware. Luckily, we have time at the shop this coming week and we could finally test to see if we really did replicate what the Korean summer team had accomplished. 

I also did a review on how to work with Xbees as our form of communication between the central computer and the podcars. It has been a semester since I last worked with Xbees so I wanted to refresh my memory on how to configure them using two different Xbee adapters, how to upload sketches to an Arduino while the Xbees are present, and how to send basic data strings from one Xbee to another read it on the Serial Monitor of the Arduino IDE. We will be looking at sending sensor data from one Xbee to another as that will be the form of how we will be implementing communication for our controls. I am looking forward to this week as we will aim for significant progress in our project compared to the last presentation we gave. We will also be focused on preparing for the next presentation and improving from the last presentation.