Chris Romanoff - Design Notebook
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.)
