Blog
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Sun, 04 Mar 2007 |
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Many Changes - Entry by Mr. Surran There has been a big change with the scheduling of work on two separate robots. I've found that as a teacher, I was stretched too thin trying to supervise two separate teams of young students at the same time. Issues of maturity and safety prompted me to initiate a rotating schedule, so each week we have just one team working on the robot while the other team works on their website and blog. While it seems like this will slow things down a bit, now that each team has my dedicated focus to guide and help, they are more productive with the time they have. Recent work on the sentry bot has included the programming of the steering system, enabling WIFI for wireless remote access, and prototyping the sonar to the parallel port. Regarding steering, it works! However, it seems a bit too "jerky". One mistake we made in the original design was to use relays to control the steering motor. A relay is fine for a motor that is on or off for a relatively long period of time, but for a motor that is on and off in multiple directions very quickly, the relays add a lot of noise and delay. I'm sure we're pushing those contacts pretty hard, too. If we have time, we'll replace the steering relays with a solid-state H-bridge. The wireless networking is done using a cheap USB WIFI adapter. I had to install NDISWRAPPER to get it to work, but now we have untethered control of the robot! We are currently working on connecting the sonar, which lights LEDs (it was originally meant to help people park their car by using green, yellow, and red lights) to the parallel port status pins. This is done using an optoisolator. We'll be soldering this circuitry to the controller board this week. The students have struggled using this site to upload their pictures. I'll try to give them a hand so you can see their progress. Posted 07:03
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