Check out our recent progress on the Picaxe Micromouse kit, out first robot!
Howdy! Welcome to the official blog of the Texas A&M University Eta Kappa Nu Micromouse competition team. For more information, please visit our website at http://hkn.tamu.edu/micromouse or knock on our lab door - 225A in Zachry
Monday, March 26, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012
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).
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
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
Sunday, March 11, 2012
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.
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.
(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.
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