Week 1 of Spring Semester 2017

Last week marked the first week of class for the second half of the project year. With a tough past semester, I managed to get some needed rest as well as making some progress in our project. Over the winter break, I was able to build code and test it on one microcontroller to determine if our team can use one microcontroller without any issues instead of using two. I was pleased to report to my team that we can transition our whole system to using an Arduino Mega because there seemed to be no interference with any of the sensors or components and the system response was surprisingly fast. The code was also much more condense than the previous code we had for each of the microcontrollers.

During this past week, I was assigned to fix some bugs that our team was experiencing with the LED status indicators as well as breaking from a loop when an indicator turns on without any indication that it will end without resetting the microcontroller. I was successfully able to fix those bugs and our system prototype seems to work satisfactorily. I was also able to assign station numbers to the RFID tags based on some serial number that the RFID reader would read. We are still having issues trying to drive the motors and the servo in the same manner that the past year's team implemented but if in any case, we would have to drive those components a different way and just adjust the performance as we see fit when we test our system.

After this coming week, we will only have roughly about 6 weeks to have a fully functional demo of our project. This leaves little time for mistakes and postponement of the project. With our team leader assigning us roles and tasks on a weekly basis, I am confident that our team will succeed this semester and have demo that will at least make me feel good and proud of. In the coming week, I will be meeting up often and working with my team to finish the pathing and routing of our system as well as getting the motors and the servo to run either in the past year's method or create a different method. We plan to build and test no later than the end of this month so that we have a reasonable amount of time to fix any bugs in our system.