Weekly Meetings

Hey guys,

I would like to try and have a separate meeting time from the mouse class meeting time for at least those that cannot make the Monday 4-5 time, so please fill this out ASAP. Go to the link below and fill out the color corresponding with your name for every time slot that you are busy (for the whole semester, not just this week). It is 30 minute slots, so if the time says 5:30, that means 5:30-6. If you are only busy for part of the 30 minute block, do not color it in because we may have to have a meeting time that some people have to come late to.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

MicromouseMember Availability - Fall 2012 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuTucsevXByqdFpGcjA4NWxpbGF5bm5CT1RnWnVMVlE

Brock 

PS:

For those of you who have not subscribed to the list serv, please go here to fill out the form: http://hkn.tamu.edu/mailman/listinfo/mouse-team_hkn.tamu.edu

Also, those who are not following the blog, please subscribe to it here: http://tamu-micromouse.blogspot.com/2012/04/wednesdays-meeting-and-blogtrottrcom.html

Late Night Labwork

Here are some videos of me with the new stepper motor drivers from TI driving the 35L unipolar stepper motors.

First tests

Modified tests

Let me know if you guys have any questions or comments. I will be working on this the first few days of the week if any of you want to come check it out. I understand that the video quality does not show up extremely well on the blog even though the original shot was pretty decent.

Thanks!

Brock

Micromouse Meeting/Class Monday

Hey Mouse Team!

The first Micromouse Class is tomorrow at 4:10pm. The class is held every Monday for an hour from 4:10 to 5:10p. If you are in the class, please be in attendance. If you are not in the class, please try to come anyway because there may be great opportunities to learn new things during that class time. I believe there are still class spots available to those who would like the class credit.

Let me know if you guys have any questions.

Thanks!

Brock

Meeting on Saturday

Hey Mouse Team!

I would like to meet with you all this Saturday (9/1/12) before school starts in order to:

A) Get a count of all who is committed for this semester

B) Give a short show and tell of things that had been done in the summer

C) Start assigning new tasks to be done early this semester

I would like to have the meeting starting around 1:00pm. Please everyone that can make it email me back and anyone who cannot make it, please let me know what time may be better so that I can maybe move the meeting time for you or have an extra meeting time for me to meet with a second group.

Thanks Guys!

Summer Meeting

Hey Guys,

I think it would be a great idea to have a first summer meeting on Google Hangout here in the next few days. If you all can do me a favor and respond to this post with a preferred afternoon around 8p that you would like to have the meeting at, I would appreciate it. I am currently working as an intern this summer, so I need to be able to schedule the meeting a bit later in the day unless you guys want to do meetings on the weekend - which is a fine idea as well. I guess, just respond back with some suggestions. We will figure it out.

Brock

285 & 485 Class Info

Straight From Jackie:

Dr. Enjeti’s sections of ECEN 285 & 485 for the micromouse team have been opened in Howdy.  The meeting time is listed and students can register for the course independently. 

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Jackie

So, I suggest anyone who would like to sign up for these classes to go and check to see if the class times fit your schedule.

Brock

485 Reports

Don't forget that 485 semester reports are due to Dr. Enjetti Today!

New General Logo

Created a new logo tonight during a study break. What do you guys think?

"Micro-mouse"

I put it on the title of the blog too. Let me know what you guys think of it and it's use there. Thanks!

Wednesday's Meeting and BlogTrottr.com

ATTENTION EVERYONE!

On Wednesday, physical Micromouse meetings for this semester will come to an end. Because neither Chris nor I will be ta tonight's meeting due to HKN inductions/elections, we are planning on having the whole team meet for a few minutes for some closing semester business on Wednesday. We plan to hold the meeting at it's regular 7:00p time in the NEW Micromouse Lab located in room 225A. Anyone who cannot make that time for a maximum of 30min, please let me know.


To get to the room, head to the back of Zachry (Bizzel Side) on the second floor. The new computer lab is there (room 224). Walk in and enter the private computer lab (room 225). Next, look to the left of the lab and find the double doors with room label 225A and a keypad. If the door is not open or no one is outside, go ahead and knock.

Also, the new Micromouse shirts will be distributed then. I still haven't seen them in person, but they should be awesome!

BlogTrottr

Okay, I know I had a bunch of you sign up for Email feeds for the blog at feedburner.google.com, but this service has become a bit of a hassle for me to get messages out to you quickly when it is necessary due to the fact that the new emails containing the feed only go out once a day at some predetermined time. BlogTrottr.com offers the same sort of service, but with almost instant updates. This means that when I make a post, you get it within the hours - much more acceptable in terms of time. I will of course leave the feedburner subscription available, but if you would all please sign up for the BlogTrottr.com service, it would make all of our communications via the blog much easier. I included the following form in order to speed up the process.

Your email:

As you sign up for this service though, please remember to unsubscribe to the feedburner.google.com service or else you will have 2 emails coming in for each post - one delayed more than the other.

See you guys Wednesday!

BIG Tuesday Meeting

Chris sent the following email to Jackie the other day.

Howdy!
Come to Micromouse's big meeting next week Tuesday (4/24) at 5:30pm in Zachry 119A!

• Free pizza!

• Learn about Micromouse's progress

• Find out how to be involved next year

• Explore options for class credit for Micromouse - ECEN 485 and Senior Design!

Want to know what's going on and how you can be a part of the team traveling to our first ever international competition?  Join us on Tuesday!
Thanks & Gig 'em,

- TAMU HKN Micromouse team

Chris and I have been planning a large meeting for a while and hope to see you all there to support us in recruiting new members to the team for next semester. I hope that all leaders will make their best effort to get to the meeting at 5:30. Chris and I do not expect the meeting to last more that 30min.

I look forward to tomorrow!

Brock

Shirts-A-Comin'

I will do my best to let you guys know when the shirts will be coming in. CC Creations informed me that the process to creation normally takes 10 days, but we may try to expedite in order to make the "big meeting".

Try out the QR code!

Reminder

Make sure that you have filled out your task list as much as you can before the meeting tonight so that we can best move forward with the project. At least write down your current task and what you plan on working on next. The more you document things like this, your findings, your designs, etc. the easier it will be for you now and in the future.

Please let me know if you need help before the meeting by email so that we are not doing that during the meeting.

Thanks guys,

Brock

Task List and This Weekend

I reformatted the departmental task list last night, so if you guys can start filling it in, that would be great. I hope to come up with a more streamlined solution to keeping track of what everyone is doing soon, but I think this will take some time.

Peripheral Electronics:

• Progress with motor driver and motor research

Data/Logic Electronics:

• Micro-controller evaluation progress

Mechanical

• Chassis and overall design progress

Software

• Git repository population progress

Chris and I hope to put a logging mechanism into effect for the group so that anything that we find in research, design, or discover can be written down and used later for Micromouse projects later on through the years and for ourselves when we have questions about why we did something the way we did. Dr. Villareal suggested us to use permanently bounded notebooks (like lab notebooks) so that we could also date what we wrote in the case we wanted to patent anything we developed.

Let me know what you guys think about this suggestion or if you have any other suggestions of your own in the comments.

Don't forget that I would like to have the task list stuff mostly started by the end of the week. By doing this, it will help me to make a project timeline so that we can better coordinate what we do and will help us move more efficiently.

Task Lists and Webinar

Tonight we are continuing with creating our departmental task lists. Also, I recently got the GIT software server set up and am ready to start handing out keys for access.

By the end of the week, I would like for each of the parts of the group to have submitted a tentative task list so that we can see where we are and what we need to do next.

I understand that this may not be extremely clear to everyone on how to do this. Please let me know if you need any help.

This past week on Friday, we had a meeting with Soon Wan of IEEE Region 1. He talked to us lectured us and sent us some really great material on Micromouse robot design. The PowerPoint he provided us is at this address:

Soon Wan Webinar Powerpoint

You can follow along with the meeting with the following sound file:

Webinar Recording.mp3

You guys may want to use this as a resource to start your task lists. I have a sound file available of the meeting as well if you would like to hear what we talked about and gain some extra insight on what happened. I will try to post that soon as well. If you would like access to it sooner, see me.

Howdy!

Check out our recent progress on the Picaxe Micromouse kit, out first robot!

   

More pictures here: 

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150119475954901.295073.266586489900&type=1&l=a9f65ba50a



This Week's Tasks & Final Shirt Design Progress

(1) - This Week's Tasks

Known Current tasks:

• Sam Carey and I are currently working on the hardware/software interface for the PIC32 micro-controller.
• Andersen is working on commenting the cognitive algorithm code and will be explaining his new additions this week.
• Chris and I are looking for members to take on leadership roles. By increasing the number of leaders, the project will be better organized, the delegation of tasks will become more efficient, and the accountability toward those tasks will be increased.
• All members approve of New T-Shirt design

Tasks to be completed:

• Research/Order parts
• Replacement LEDs for the PicAxe board
• Serial to USB converter/breakout board for PIC32/Arduino comms and diagnostics (UART)
• New T-Shirts
• Testing Maze Foundation/Walls
• Research
• Algorithm to linearize Sharp IR distance sensors
• Develop psuedocode module to be later translated
• Structural design of robot
• Find possible manufacturers for home cooked design (or)
• Find/ a purchasable base which we can build on
• Design
• Power interface for all on-board electronics
• For Arduino
• For PIC32
• Other
• Help Chris and I develop a Project Timeline

(2) - Final Shirt Design Progress

Though the vectorization of the images in the shirts are still not yet complete, the following design is going to be extremely close to what we get for our new shirts. The original maze idea was changed to a QR code which doubles as a maze (though it is a simple one).

Please drop some comments so that we can finalize the design and have it sent off for production. Thanks!

Software Conference

Unless there are any objections, the software conference will take place on Thursday at 7pm CST on Google+. I will post the hangout link on my Google+ around 6:50 so that we can all be ready for 7.

If you have not yet added me to your own Google+, do so by going to plus.google.com and searching for "Brock Martin" (I think clicking here will do the trick as well). I will be waiting for requests this week and will add you to my circles so that you can join the hangout. Also, if you do not yet have a Google+ account, it is very simple and quick to create such an account at plus.google.com.

Let me know if anyone has any questions, concerns.

Brock

A Few Things During the Break

(1) Potential Software Conference
I received the maze solving software from Andersen Puckett this past week. Though I already knew what was supposed to happen on a large scale (I just realized there I was talking about a MicroMouse robot), I took a bit of time to analyze what was going on at a more detailed level. Afterwards, I developed some questions about some of the details.

I think it would be an awesome idea for us all to at least understand the logic of the program. Andersen did write some basic pseudo code for anyone to read, but to step through the code on a line-by-line basis like I did may help us to better understand what is really going on. This would benefit us in that afterwards, we may be able to better suggest new additions to the code and also help us to identify issues later when running the bot in maze.

I am still waiting on Andersen to get back to me, but I personally would like to attend a Google Hangout with him this week. I am inviting anyone to attend this with me if it will happen. Let me know if anyone is interested and I will let you know when Andersen returns my email.

(2) Somewhat Final Shirt Design
The reason I use the word somewhat is because Ben Loeb, the student who made the Micromouse (what I call) sketch/signature is planning on drawing one last version which we will use on our shirt. He wants to draw it larger so that we can get a higher quality image from it.

Anyway, while he is doing that this week, we can look at the following image of what the shirt should pretty much look like except that I am still battling with myself as to what colors I should do.

I liked the white shirts from before, but I liked the colors Tim had put on his shirt too. Anyone have a strong opinion?

(3) Other Software Issues
In searching on how we will overcome attempting to run the cognitive and peripheral software systems on a single chip, I ran across some ways to partition processor usage across multiple processes in a way that attempts at something close to multi-threading (http://www.romanblack.com/PICthread.htm). Of course, this may be a great topic to talk about when we have our software conference, if that occurs during the break.

Shirt Draft 1 Type 2

Here is a shirt idea that Tim sent to me just now. Anybody have any comments?

Shirt Draft 2 Type 1

Okay,

Ben decided to change the font of the writing above the mouse and I also added some logos for HKN and Texas A&M.

What do you guys think?

Shirt Draft 1 Type 1

I went ahead and took the image that Ben drew and put it on a shirt.

Ben says he plans on going over the final product in pen, but I kind of like the sketch look the drawing has. Let me know what you guys think.

Micromouse T-Shirt Draft 1 & Follow by Email

(1) - Micromouse T-Shirt Draft 1

Below is a sketch that a friend of mine (Ben Loeb) drew today for our Micromouse T-Shirts. Please comment on what you guys think. Also, do not hesitate to give any ideas to the drawing. If you guys like it, he is willing to draw it up again so that we can use it.

(2) - Follow by Email

On the right hand side of the blog, you may now see a gadget which will allow you to subscribe to this blog by E-mail so that you do not have to check back at the main blog for new updates. Of course, the blog utilities such as the calendar and the contacts list will always be available here.

Wednesday's Meeting & New Blog Features

(1) - Wednesday's Meeting

Members at the Micromouse meeting on Wednesday worked on the following items:

• Software - (Matt Paige, Anderson Puckett, Sam Carey)
• Discussed the details of different methods for the discovery of nodes in the maze.
• Worked on the implementation of one of the search methods. This method will be able to detect open spaces and blocked spaces by sensing the walls of the maze.
• Researched various libraries to allow the Arduino to handle multi-threaded type applications
• Found libraries which may be of use.
• Brief talk about the Arduino interface.
• Using the initial ideas of the maze discovery software, discussed how the integration of the sensor software modules and the maze solving algorithm block.
• Hardware - 
• Nothing completed in this area.

(2) - New Blog Features

I took some time this past week to make the blog site more useful to the team by adding more utility. The site now features a Calendar and Contacts tab where relevant information may be found.



Calendar - This tab of course contains an embedded Google Calendar of coming up events of our team. Please add this to your calendar if at all possible. If you have a Google Calendar, you can do this by clicking on the  button on the bottom right of the calendar.

Contacts - This tab contains an embedded version of our member schedule spreadsheet. I have only allowed the email addresses to be seen through this view so that not just anybody can start calling your cellphone. If anyone has a problem with privacy in me adding this feature, please let me know and I can either remove it or come up with some other way to present contact information.

If anyone would like to let me know of anything else I could add to the blog site in order to increase its functionality and use, I would appreciate it.

I will most likely post again on Sunday before Monday's meeting.

Meeting Tonight!

Attention Team Members!

Don't forget that there is a meeting tonight at 7pm. Rumors of free HKN pizza later on at 8pm have been circulating .

Chris will be meeting everyone at the beginning of the meeting in room 111B to help facilitate ideas on what needs to be done today. Some suggestions of mine are:

• Discuss more about parts
• Short range IR sensors were found last meeting which should suit our needs -  [Short Range Sharp IR sensors: (GP2D120XJ00F) http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8959]
• Check the blog at tamu-micromouse.blogspot.com for more parts suggestions
• Join the blog (Become followers)
• Work more on soldering
• *Note - there is a PicAxe board that was soldered so that the LED's are too close to the board. If you believe you have mad de-soldering skills, go ahead and detach the LED's, otherwise leave the board for me to take care of later this week or Monday. If you are to apply much more heat to the board, the pad may lift and the board will have to be modified in order to provide the same functions
• Research info on Arduino platform
• find how to implement something like software threads. Basically, the robot must both be able to handle low level functions such as motor control and sensor reading as well as computing the maze-solving algorithm at the same time. The PicAxe uses two separate pic controllers to complete these two functions. It would be preferable to allow our design to use only one micro-controller to handle both tasks though a call needs to be made back to each task frequently.
• Join the Blog <- I know this is the second time (we really need people to follow this)

Also, have one individual send either me (Brock Martin @ bamartin125@gmail.com) or Chris (chrisjagielski@gmail.com) an email with a short summary afterward containing some info about what was accomplished at the meeting.

Good luck guys!

Brock

Next Week

(1) - New Parts
During our Monday and Wednesday meetings at 7pm (uMouse Calendar Link), we will be taking some time to decide on what products we should purchase.

Chris had suggested some products earlier this week:

• LED Module
• http://www.picaxe.com/Hardware/Add-on-Modules/Budget-Serial-LCD-Module/
• More Full Kits
• http://www.picaxe.com/Hardware/Robot-Kits/PICAXE-PICone-Micromouse/
• http://www.robotstorehk.com/micromouse/RS-CRUISER.HTML
• http://www.active-robots.com/robots/robot-kits-1/airat-ii-micromouse-robot.html
• Inexpensive Chassis from another bot
• http://www.techsupplies.co.uk/epages/Store.sf/en_GB/ObjectPath=/Shops/Store.TechSupplies/Products/BOT120
• Arduino based Kit
• http://www.active-robots.com/robots/4-wheel-drive-rovers/3wd-48mm-omni-wheel-robot-kit.html
• Sensor Kit
• http://www.active-robots.com/shop-by-brand/vex-robotics/vex-robotics-sensors/advanced-sensor-kit.html

If anyone would like to comment on these suggestions or make some new suggestions, please feel free to do so. We hope to make purchases such as these as early as next week.



(2) - Kit Completion
The robotics kit build is still underway at the soldering bench. Hopefully once this is done, new ideas for our home-brew Micromouse will surface.




(3) - Electronics Hardware & Software Challenge
Since we began writing the code for the Arduino platform, we have started to discover new challenges with incorporating both the live path-finding algorithm and using the basic environment understanding in order to keep the bot between two walls without hitting anything.


The code that we obtained from the PicAxe as well as the manual on how the PicAxe works must be broken down starting this week so that we may gain some ideas on how this challenge may be resolved on the Arduino platform.


(4) - T-Shirts
Last meeting, many members gave their ideas on what should go on the new T-Shirts. If anyone has any new ideas, sketches, or anything else to contribute, do not hesitate to either email Chris or myself or simply bring your idea to the next meeting you are able to attend.





This week should be a productive one!

Howdy!

Welcome to the TAMU HKN Micromouse team Blog!

For more information about the team, visit us at http://hkn.tamu.edu/micromouse

Thanks & Gig 'em!