Week 15

In the past week, my team and I prepared for our last presentation of the semester where various people attended our presentations throughout the day. My family came out to support me during my team's presentation and I felt pretty good about the presentation that I executed. The night before the presentation, I rehearsed my lines well and made sure that I covered each point of the presentation well.

Besides the presentation, my team and I also needed to prepare our final report for our project where our documentation must be fully detailed so that other teams that continue this project can pick up where our team left off and continue without trying to determine what needs to be done. I am in the process of writing up some sections that were assigned to me by Chris and also proofreading the code so that it is readable and "clean" for future teams to look at. I am aiming to apply common programming practices to our code as well as fully commenting our code with detail so that it is clear what each function or each section of the code does with respect to the full length of the code.

There is not much time to test anything else for our project and our full attention has been focused on writing up the report. Maker Faire is coming up this week and our project is ready to be showcased in San Mateo. I am hoping that the podcars run smoothly on the track with less problems than what we had experienced at Paseo in April. We are on the last stretch of this project and we must aim to leave a well documented report as well as an improved controls system compared to the last team that worked on this aspect of the Superway project.

Week 14

In the past week, I have begun to create a library for one of the electronic components that is wired to the Arduino Mega. Since I was a beginner at writing my own library, I began with the most simple component that we are using in our controls system, the RGB LED. Initially, I struggled to get the library working and I looked at a few Youtube videos to see how a library is created. After a few attempts at making the library work in the Arduino environment, I was able to successfully make it work and thus I was able to turn on the LED using the library I created. The only problem I encountered that I am unable to fix at the moment is that I was not able to make the LED blink using the library. Fortunately, the mobile app team will provide me with some assistance in making the LED blink using the library. I also attempted to create a library for our two ultrasonic sensors that are used for collision detection. Since the podcar that I took to test out the libraries that I created only has one ultrasonic sensor, I was unable to test out the library and I would have to wait until I am in the shop again.

I have also begun to prepare for our last team presentation of the semester that is coming up this coming week. I have begun to prepare my slides and formulate my thoughts so that when my team and I rehearse, I will be prepared and will be able to make some adjustments if needed. We also have the final report coming up but that is not due until the following week so I still have time to contribute to the report. During the coming week, my team and I will be rehearsing for our final presentation where my family will be attending our presentation and I will also try to create more libraries as well as writing up the final report and the individual evaluations.

Week 13

During the past week, my team and I have not really done much since most of the work that needs to be done involves the mobile app. We do have some work that the app team wants us to such as cleaning up the code for readability purposes and to also condense the length of the current code so that future teams can easily read it and it will also allow to remove the lag experienced in the code through the podcar.

In the length of the week, I looked at examples of how to create a header file and a C++ file that would make up a custom library. I looked at the Arduino website while simultaneously looking at Youtube videos to see if anyone had done. Fortunately, there were people who have accomplished this before and I was glad to finally learn how to create a library both in the Arduino environment and using the ChIDE that most ME students might have used in their ME 30 class. Basically, a header file and a C++ file must have a file of their own and included under one folder in the main library folder of the Arduino IDE. This was a problem I kept experiencing while attempting to follow the example in the Arduino website. I still have to learn how to convert our functions and apply what I learned in that example to one of functions. Once one function has been converted into a library, the rest of the functions should be easy to do.

In the coming week, I am planning to convert at least one of our functions into a library so that we can begin condensing our code as well as cleaning up the code to follow standard programming practices. I hope to also help my team with anything else that we still need to do before Maker Faire.