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.