February 2012 Blog Posts (7)

Today was Individual Evaluation 2! Because I was fortunate enough to be evaluated closer to the end, the day in the shop was pretty productive.

After remounting the encoder system with a smaller crossbar and battery mount, it was time to begin integrating the circuits and electromechanical subsystems. Mason set up the fuse and emergency switch on the…

Many milestones were hit this week for our team. On Tuesday, we started the beginning of the long integration process, testing out how Tom's coded pulse width modulation would work through Mason's driver board when connected to the fully mounted (and functional) motors. The results were very promising.

On the electromechanical side specifically, The final structure of the robot is complete. The motors were remounted using steel strapping instead of plumbing fittings, which…

Over the weekend, I have finished writing code for the PWM output that can drive motors at different rates. Since Mason has soldered his driver circuit and Abigail has the mobile base assembled, we decided to integrate the three parts together.

The result turned out to be pretty good: the 12V power source powered the entire circuit which then amplified the PWM signals sent from the PIC. Based on the PWM duty cycles, the two motors span at different speeds.…

Today was pretty standard - went to the soldering seminar, and then hit the shop around 3:00. The day was spent prototyping our arm design.

Our arm is passive - we have no motors or actuators attached to it. The concept is pretty basic - small, light balsa wood strips are mounted to a rotational bearing that is centred in the robot, mounted 45cm up. On the end of the arm, elastic bands are used to both stabilize it (preventing unwanted bouncing etc.) and as the…

I spent quite some time trying to be able to write data to EEPROM, but no matter what I did it wouldn't work. Even when I copied the exact same code the book provides, it didn't do anything. I emailed Prof. Emami about it today and this is his response:

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Hi Andrew, the reason why it doesn't write to the EEPROM is that you do not disable the EEPROM write…

Hey does any AER group have two AC to DC power supplies? Our group lost ours so may I please ask you guys to do me a favour, if you ever found out you took two power supplies by accident, would you please return one to me? Thanks in advance and I really appreciate that! ps, I am in Tuesday's tutorial. pps, I am the guy carring a sony DSLR everyday in case you don't know me.

Man, Wednesday section is packed. I don't think I'll go back to Wednesday sessions unless I REALLY need the time... lots of people who didn't have labs must have come also, and the tools were in high demand, along with the workspace.

Today, both motors were successfully mounted to the base. The transmission system is complete! I am very proud of my handiwork, as it took me around 2-3 hours to get the alignment of the gears perfect. The result is worth it though - I'll post a…