Weekly Log Feb 7-13

We met with Matthew on Monday to review his progress on the robot. He is still cutting all of the pieces, and it’s honestly taking longer than we expected. He told us that he doesn’t know how long the manufacturing process will take and that he couldn’t give us a deadline for when he will be done. He will be finished cutting the motor mounts on Tuesday. He wanted to get the second motor on Monday to double check that the motors are identical. We also dropped off the caster wheels to help with the fabrication and assembly.

We have received proper connectors for the end of the motor’s wires to connect to the ring terminals. We will need to purchase a 15 pin to 9 pin cord to help connect the motor controller to the computer. This is needed for the mixed mode we want to use to code for the motors. The problem with this mode is that we need a closed loop system. This means that we would need to attach encoders to the wheels. The robot wasn’t designed to need encoders. We are currently looking into all of the modes to decide what we need to do now. We also plan to purchase a battery tender and wire it up so that it will be easy to charge the robot. The user will only have to plug the charging device into an outlet and a port on the robot base.

We have tested and measured the output of both infrared sensors to make sure that they work. These will be the sensors placed on the front of the large robot. They will be used to detect objects for the obstacle avoidance algorithm.