Getting the Crown

Printed and implementing the test harness

We decided to use MDF for our prototype and implement our sensors right away. This was worth it it because the price difference form Foamcore and MDF was not significant to our the remainder of our funds.
 An almost Isometric View of our bot

Top View of our bot

Front view of our bot (note the sensors)Underneath the front view of the bot

Solidworks Model

Progress 11/16/14

• got farther with the mechanical design with the help from visualization of the 3d model
• soldered the IR sensors on perfboard
• made templates for the sub state machine for future implementation
• started interfacing the IR sensor

tape sensor working on breadboard

Beacon Detector Schematic

block diagram for the whole system

pins were chosen to be close to each other to simplify the process of connection and debugging in the future.

some info

boards dimensions

• uno stack: 3.22" * 3.14" * 1.7" (W*L*H) 
• stepper/h-bridge driver: 1.88" * 2.25" * 0.95" \
• DS3658: 1.84" * 1.84 * 1.02"

stuff

TO-DO:
1. make cd drive grappler

• cutting the protruding edges(might need to do that after we have training for BE138)
• add the mount to the axle
• add the lifter
• interfacing this grappler to the robot

2. testing stability of driving motors by timer

• can do this on Mon(will get MCU on Sat)( the motors arrive on Mon)

3. get wheels

• Brandon could possibly contribute what they had last year if he found it.
• bought 3" roller blade wheels from amazon with other team

4. testing ultrasonic sensors(not doing this for now)

• can start on Mon when it arrives

5. system block diagram

6. tape detector on breadboard

7. interface sensors to the robot by modifying Roach library

• sonar sensor
• bumper

obstacles to tackle:

1. positioning perpendicular to the wall in the beginning
• solutions: Caio's Bump Sensor strategy, Andre's Sonar  Sensor Stratgy
2. putting the crown back to our throne
1.  
3. figuring out the size of base and wheel

some ideas:

1. ping pong ball casters
2. raising the beacon detector above 11"

unessential ideas:

1. LCD screen communicating with Arduino through UART
2. playing theme songs
• can try to find library that translate MIDI format to values which will be written to AD pins.

Bill of materials

Schedules

It Begins...

Welcome engineers and commoners!
Andre Nguyen, Caio Porto, and Ethan Pinsker have taken up the trial of building an autonomous robot that can navigate its way to a "castle" on a 96in x 96in plane, retrieve a crown form a 6in tall beacon, and then navigate back to it's starting position. We just started this project yesterday, but we look forward to implementing a multitude of sensors, writing (and rewriting) our hierarchical state machines, and building h-bridges for our motors in the next month.

Were just finishing up our drawings today and were looking at two different options for our state machines. One that uses a timer with the driven wheels, the other uses an encoder that logs all of our previous movements with our PIC32.