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 26th

.Went to our group meeting during the week.

.At this meeting we made our block diagrams. One top level of the entire project, and one lower level diagram of the circuit board. (1.5 hr)

.Also i researched mostly general information about processors because we need to choose one and i'm not entirely sure how they all work.

.I looked at a lot of things on the TI website because Dr. Johnson said that those would be very easy to obtain and they seemed to have a large selection. I'm still not sure which one to pick yet though. (1 hr.)

.Attended the weekly meeting.

.At the meeting Dr. Swabey had a few development boards so we could look at them and try to get an idea of what we want. (1 hr)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 3.5 hr

Week of October 3rd

.I looked into the development boards to try to find which one i think we should choose.

.From what i found, i really like the ones that Keil offers, i think they have a lot of what we need, but they aren't so jam packed with unnecessary things that they should still be fairly easy to use (1 hr)

.I also looked for different cameras. I googled IP cameras but it's hard to find a good one that is cheap but would still be easy to use. (1 hr.)

.Attended the weekly meeting (1 hr.)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 3 hr.

Week of October 10th

.Continued my search for cameras, but i still didn't find anything too good.

.Also looked for other things we need i.e. the wireless transceiver etc. But the ones posted by others in the discussion page were the best out of anything i saw. (1 hr.)

.Attended a mid week meeting to make the poster for the poster session. (1.5 hr.)

.Attended the weekly meeting (1 hr.)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 3.5 hr

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 hrs

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.)

.Attended the weekly meeting (1 hr.)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 9.5 hrs

Week of November 7

.Met with the group to work on our design review powerpoint (3 hr.)

.Went to the teleconference with Hong Kong and then afterwards worked more on the design review (3.5 hr.)

.Met with the team to practice the design review and then gave the design review presentation (1.5 hr)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 8 hrs.

Week of November 14

.We met and we came up with our idea of a protocol after seeing what the students at HKUST did. We also used the two byte wide data like they did. During this meeting, we also flashed the pandaboard and got Ubuntu running on it. However, the webcam that we had wouldn't work on it. The board never even detected our webcam. (3.5 hr)

.Had our teleconference on the 17th with the HKUST group. They've gotten very far on their project and they have a website that can control the motors. We collaborated and thought that maybe using a protocol that has bytes for checking the status of the commands we're sending to the vehicle. (1 hr)

.Attended our weekly meeting. (1 hr)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 5.5 hr

Week of November 21

.This week was Thanksgiving break so our group did not meet.

Week of November 28

.I looked around to try to find a good H-Bridge design that we could use to drive our motors. H-Bridges are pretty simple, but they require a lot of parts and take up some space, so i think it would be a lot better if we use a chip that has H-Bridges in it. It would be cheaper smaller.

.When our group met, Jason had the website up and running perfectly which was awesome. Also, our development board was working correctly, but we couldn't get them to work together. We believe that it is the serial cable that we are using. (3 hr)

.Attended our teleconference on Dec. 1st. We discussed ways that we could get around PAL being a local network only. Also we are trying to come up with ways to collaborate since there hasn't been much so far. Their protocol doesn't really require any collaboration at all, but that was one of our big goals, so we'll discuss that further.

.After the teleconference, our group met and finished our project as well. (3 hr)

.Attended the weekly meeting (1 hr) WEEKLY TOTAL - 7 hr

Week of December 5

.Met with the group to come up with our outline for the final presentation. (1.5 hr)

.Attended the teleconference but there was a misunderstanding with the students at HKSTU and we did not talk. We did however brainstorm more ways to increase collaboration. One way we thought of was to have some sort of a central server that both of our control data would go to. Then that server would need to pick decipher that code, pick which vehicle it's going to, then send it. So we would need to collaborate on the protocol the server would be sending and things like that.

.We also discussed our final report more and delegated the different sections amongst our group. (1.5 hr)

.Attended the weekly meeting. (1 hr)

WEEKLY TOTAL - 4 hr

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