Revision as of 17:41, 3 November 2011

Chris Romanoff - Design Notebook

Week of September 5th

.Attend our first kick off meeting (1 hr.)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 1 hr.

Week of September 12th

. Attended our weekly meeting and just discussed the project in more detail (1 hr.)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 1 hr.

Week of September 19th

.Went to our first teleconference with the team at HKUST .We discussed our general ideas of the project and some preliminary things as well. .I'm not too sure about their processor choice because it's not very easy to buy and there also isn't a lot of documentation for it either. (1.5 hr)

.Attended the weekly meeting. .A the meeting we learned about processors and what kind of factors should be considered when choosing one. (1 hr)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 2.5 hr

Week of September 27th

Week of October 17th

.Looked at the links for wireless transceivers and cameras proposed on the brainstorming page and then updated the page with my thoughts (.5 hr)

.Searched for RC cars to use a vehicle platforms. Looked a lot at the following sites:

          http://www.amainhobbies.com/index.php/cPath/1_44_1171/n/RC-Cars-Trucks-Kits-Electric-2wd-Short-Course-Kits
          http://www.nitrorcx.com/brrctr.html 
          http://www.hobbytron.com/RCCars.html

The first site listed has some good options for trucks, they're expensive, but 2 wheel drive and they're big so we could fit what we need to on the back. The second site also has some good options but they are 4 wheel drive so i don't know if that eliminates them as options The third site has tons of options (23 pages) and they're cheap, but they aren't all as big as the trucks on the other sites. (1 hr)

.Attending the meeting on Oct. 18th. We all decided on a vehicle platform, a wireless transceiver, a possible camera, some IR sensors and pushbutton switches. The links to those are on the discussion page for the meeting on Oct. 18th. We also got the blinky program running on the dev board and played around with the code a little bit so we could better understand how it works. (3 hr.)

.Attended the VIP poster session (1.5 hr.)

.Attended the weekly meeting (1 hr.)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 7 hrs.

Week of October 24th

.Attended our meeting on the 25th.

.Our tasks for this meeting were to make the list of specific things we need our processor to do. I assisted in making that and it can be viewed at the page for the meeting under discussions. Our other task was to try to finally determine a camera that would work. That's what most of my efforts were directed towards at the meeting. The CMOS camera we found was in a leadless package so it would have been very hard to try to solder to and use. But one thing i noticed was that either the cameras are in an LLC package or the breakout board is sold separately and they are retired. I found some from omnivision's website, but they used an SCCB interface. That is similar and compatible with I2C, but we were looking for something with an I2C interface so we didn't have to work around anything. But that led to the previous problem i mentioned about the LLC packaging and lack of breakout boards. Then I changed my efforts to trying to find a camera that wouldn't overload our processor. But that was very hard so for a little bit i looked at IP cameras more, but those aren't looking like that good of an option to me right now. Then we found out that if we can compress the data that we can use almost any CMOS camera. Then our meeting adjourned and our task for the rest of the week was to find a camera that would output MJPEG. (3 hr.)

. Attended the weekly meeting (1.5 hr)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 4.5

Week of October 31

.Attended the meeting on November 1st.

.At this meeting we disassembled one of our RC tanks to see how it worked on the inside. Luckily the frame was only held on by 4 screws and there was hardly anything inside. There's plenty of space inside to fit everything we need.

. We then began trying to control the motor with the PWM on the dev board but we were unsuccessful. We did make some good advancements and should be able to get it working soon.

.Finally we began making the outline for our design review. (4.5 hr)

.Attended the meeting on November 3rd.

.Finished the outline of the design review and that should be on Rhea soon.

.Got the dev board controlling the motor. We then started to put our circuit onto a permanent circuit board. (4 hr.)

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