Week 13

This week, my team and I were able to conduct some testing on a hall effect sensor so that we can transition from using a reed switch to this sensor for sensing when switching should occur. We finalized our decision on using this sensor which proved to work better than the current sensor mounted on the podcars. My only concern as well as the concern for my team is that since there are two hall effect sensors on the podcar (one from the positioning team and one from controls) that it would interfere with successfully reading the magnet on the track for our purposes.

From now until the next week, I will mainly focus on finishing a strong communication between the Arduino Uno and Micro and also coding the two functions that the software team requested from our team. I will also build a bench setup of our model by either just having everything connected to a breadboard or building another shield such as the one that is currently mounted on the podcar. I should be able to get all of this done and help my team with anything else if needed before we meet again next week. Debugging the code will be the only time consuming task from all of this as well as a couple of soldering here and there if I make the shield.

I am beginning to worry that everything is coming together in the last few weeks left for the semester and there is not much time left to get all of it done. It is time for projects, reports, presentations, and papers and all of it must get done in the next three weeks. I am beginning to stress a lot and worry that my team will not get a good grade for this semester even though I know that my team and I put in the effort to make the controls part of this project work. I am hoping we do pass this semester. It is difficult to juggle all of these classes at the same time without neglecting one class for another. In these last few weeks, I will keep on working on the project so that my team and I can reach our deadlines and goals that we had set at the beginning of this semester.