Saturday turns sunny

Hello. We brought in some heavy duty equiment today - Doug B (Tesla Motors) and welcome newcomer Eric Mac (Mindtribe). Doug continues to bring wonderful presents to support the hardware / software effort, aside from people like Eric Mac. Now we have a box full of tools just for the electronics team: crimpers, cutters, wire strippers, digital multimeters and such. Also, Doug pretty much bought one of every power strip product so there should be no excuses that you can't find an outlet to plug into now! Thanks to J Rock as well for loaning us the oscilloscope!

Eric and Doug made some serious headway on the camera - getting LabView 8.0 setup on the desktop computer. If we open up Labview, connect the camera to the computer, we can do a frame grab, pick a target, download that information to the camera, and then have it pick up that target. No working servos yet, but the camera can pick up and follow a target in its stationery field of view. Fantastic.

The oscilloscope also started giving us some well needed information about the PWM outputs coming out of the RC. Eeesh. We're only getting about a change of 25% in the PWM signal vs. the 3-100% duty cycle that the speed controller is supposed to be able to take. We thought it was the joysticks (nope) and now we think it might be the fact that GeneratePWMs only gets updated every 26.2 ms. We'd like to dig into the GeneratePWM function and see what it's all about since it's not giving us the expected output.

Em spent some time with Sophia explaining the timed autonomous code that was written in December. I will post this code on my FTP site for you guys to access and download and play with. Now Sophia understands what my autonomous code is doing, she should be able to explain to you what is happening. Again, ALL the computers (3 laptops, 1 desktop) should now have the newest version of MPLAB, C18 compiler, and the FRC2006 code, that successfully compiles!

Things to do next:

1. Programming team: Hook up an analog input i.e. potentiometer and try to read out the values (hint, using the printf to the terminal that we've always used). If you are going to Fry's also pick up the connector that goes with the 7.2 battery so we can set up the 2006 RC. Finally, can you hook up the 12V battery with the quick connects??

2. Em will post the autonomous code in a few days (probably by Monday night).

3. Look at and get the camera code running.

4. Set up the 2006 RC with some minimal inputs. Can we quickly mock up a surface to mount everything to for now? Velcro will do for now.

Cool. Thanks much!

- Emily