The date is: Mon Feb 1 09:31:54 MST 1999 This week the team and I worked on trying to develop an understanding of the problem. We were able to break the problem up into its various subcomponents. I believe that right now we are having an incredible amount of team spirit and understanding amongst the four of us. True team sprit has been developed. This next week will be spent trying to order parts and put together the track drive for the robot. I suspect that it is going to take about 2 weeks to have the track drive mounted and debugged onto the base of the robot. The track drive seems to be the way to go. We are going to attempt to use a cog belt system to drive the robot. We will order the parts from Graingers, hopefully on Monday of the coming week. Till next week, we shall see where we are at. The date is: Thu Feb 4 17:10:50 MST 1999 This week was a matter of trying to determine what the possible options we had in our design of a track drive system. We discovered that Graingers carried a large supply of pulleys and belts. We ordered a belt and pulley for both the left and right sides of our robot. The parts arrived and we have now begun our layout work for connecting the pulleys to the motors and attaching the idler pulleys to the base of the robot. We also spent most of today trying to determine what we can use for idler pulleys. Gambles here in Socorro carried a set of encapsulated bearings that we are going to use for our idler pulleys. This coming week will be spent trying to put the base together. I have hopes that by this time next week, the base should be 75% complete. Since all of our parts are pretty much off the shelf parts, there shouldn't be too much problem in trying to achieve our goal. Next week I will also spend some time trying to determine the best technique for fire detection. Until then, it should be very busyyy!! The date is: Thu Feb 11 17:12:14 MST 1999 This week was spent working on trying to get the base of the robot manufactured. We spent quite a bit of time trying to determine the best way to mount the encapsulated bearings to the base. The biggest trick was trying to determine the best way to mount a washer to the other side of the encapsulated bearing. We decided to keep the washer on the other side of the bearing from turning. This should hopefully be ok, and it might even keep the belt from coming off. The other task of the week was spent working with Hammatsu to get some free samples. This proved to also be a success. Next week is going to be very busy trying to get the motor and the top idler pulley mounted to the base. This part of the base is highly critical to the performance of the track drive. I am assuming that this is going be a very difficult task. All of the idler pulleys and driver pulley have to be perfectly in-line. If they are off by just a little bit, the belt will have a higher tendency to come off from the pulleys. Nexst week, will also be spent trying to prepare for the design presentation that we must give on Thursday. Till pen and paper meet again.- The date is: Thu Feb 18 13:57:08 MST 1999 This week was spent trying to accomplish two things, getting ready for the presentation that is today (Thursday), and completing the base. On Tuesday Jake, Mike, and I spent the entire afternoon working on trying to get the upper idler pulleys built on the base. This proved to be much easier than was expected. By using the belt attached to the two bottom idler pulleys, we were able to line up the top idler pulleys and motor pulley. This was a rather involved task, but once we determined where the idler pulley mounting brackets were supposed to be placed onto the base, the actual mounting was rather trivial. The base hardware was successfully mounted on Tuesday. There are several high friction areas on the base that need to be removed. Jake is going to be spending all of next Tuesday getting a lot of the friction out of the base. On Wednesday afternoon, the team got together to have a team meeting to discuss the presentation, current progress, and future directions. This was a very successfull meeting. So, far the group is headed in the right direction. We are still on track for getting the robot moving autonomously by the first week of March. Next week is going to be spent developing some coding ideas for the code development. I expect by next week, the Hammamatsu flame sensor should be arriving. It would be great to start testing it, to determine the feasibility of the UVTron. There is still a lot of work to be done, but we have parallel efforts which should help to keep us on track time-wise. The date is: Thu Feb 25 18:07:12 MST 1999 This week was rather eventful. The past weekend, I spent the time re-working the base. There were several issues with the current base design. The motors were flexing within the mounts due to the mounts not being attached to the base with a strong motor mount. We were able to attach the motor mount to a stronger piece of aluminum and mount the two motors on the rear end of the robot. We were also able to weld the washers onto the encapsulated bearing which made the design much more robust. The base seemed to flex when the robot motor was turned on. So, I was able to mount stronger axle mounts to the bottom of the base. This also made the base much stronger than it was without the full length axle mounts. After this work, the base seems to be complete. There is not much more work to do with the base, except for attaching the components to the base. We were able to turn the base on with the batteries, and test the base. The base handled perfectly!!! This week I also spent some time working with the UVTron. We plugged the UVTron in, and it appears to work with the 5meter specification. The UVTron produces a 5 volt pulse whenever it sees the flame. The UVTron is going to work to our expectations. This next week, I will spend some time working on designing and building an IR flame sensor. We are going to maybe need another flame sensor to be able to zoom into the flame. Using an IR flame sensor might enable us to do this. Next week will be spent with this investigation. Our group dynamics are still great!! No change in what is going on with our design. We are right on the edge of having the components complete, and preparing for system integration. Till next week... The date is: Fri Mar 5 17:20:09 MST 1999 This week was spent trying to develop a flame sensor design that would be viable for detecting the IR emmission from the candle flame. This proved to be a rather easy experience. By simply using the PN168 phototransistor that we used in Circuits II lab, I was able to amplify the voltage drop over the emitter resistor with a single supply op-amp. I have heard from many groups in the past that a floppy disk magnetic material is an excellent filter for all wavelengths under 700nm. It appears that this is indeed true. The whole week was spent working on this sensor. Jake was busy working on an active filter design for the sound start sensor. Mike was also busy working on trying to complete the H-Bridge board, while Rob was finishing his wall/line sensor PCB board. Overall this week was extremely productive, and we are still on schedule for a movable autonomous base before spring break. This next week will be spent testing the H-Bridge board, and integrating the Altera PWM to the HC11 and the H-Bridge board. This will be a busy week, as we are trying to prepare for the midterm review after Spring Break. The group is working EXCELLENT! We are very happy with our current progress, and expect to continue the momentum. We have a long ways ahead of us, but we are right on the edge for complete systems integration. It is definately exciting times!! Till pen and paper meet again.... The date is: Fri Mar 12 09:56:48 MST 1999 This was quite a week. We had started the week off by preparing for the arrival of the Altera 7128 chip which would hold all of our pulse accumulators, and PWM. This chip arrived and we were able to begin testing the Altera code. I spent most of last weekend wire-wrapping the board that the Altera chip will be placed into. We had some surprises because the Altera chip was a 3.3v device. All of our external circuitry is 5v. So, on Tuesday I built an adjustable voltage regulator to step higher voltages to 3.3v. Testing of the Altera chip proved to be quite a disaster. The ribbon cable that connected the HC11 to the external Altera board caused the HC11 to not want to boot. For some reason, this was causing the HC11 to always be in reset. The ribbon cable seemed to be capacitively coupling the reset line with the various data lines. This was a mess. We were able to drive the Altera reset line separately from the HC11, and this appeared to at least allow the HC11 to boot into Buffalo. But, the Altera chip just did not want to work. After staying at the JD lab till Wednesday morning at 3:30 a.m., we concluded that we had some Altera bugs. After fixing the bugs, on Thursday night we reached a MAJOR milestone. We connected the HC11 to the Altera chip, and to the H-bridge board, and everything worked PERFECT. Next week, will be spent doing absolutely nothing until next weekend due to spring break. The next step in the project is to get the control code working. Till pen and paper meet again... The date is: Sat Apr 3 12:28:19 MST 1999 This was a rather tough week academically for our team due to tests and projects that were due this week. None of us had much time to spend on the robot on Tuesday due to the pressure of our other classes. Thursday was a much more productive day. It turned out that the reason why our pulse accumulators were behaving so poorly was due to the fact that our Altera chip being a 3.3v device was picking up 1.5v noise which caused the pulse accumulators to trigger. By placing doubly schmitt triggers from the motor encoders to the pulse accumulator input on the Altera chip, we were able to clean up the noise, and now the Altera chip is behaving properly. This was about 4-5 days wasted trying to figure out what was going on. We couldn't get any of our controller code to work, because the pulse accumulators were storing invalid data. This was a huge relief to know that we hadn't placed a huge flaw into our design. But, the truth is that we are definately learning with this project!! This coming week is going to be quite eventful. This is going to be a complete programming week! Robert will be mounting the proximity sensors to the robot. Jake will be working on the design and implementation of the starter signal filter. Mike and myself will be considered the next Code Warrior 2000. I expect this week to be extremely productive!! Till pen and paper meet again... The date is: Sat Apr 10 20:20:56 MDT 1999 This was a huge week! I know that this report is late, but I totally forgot to do it with the pressure of the national competition this coming week. Anyways, we have Trixie completely mounted with all of her components except for the fan blade and starter board. This stuff will be placed on the robot this week. This Thursday I went to Santa Fe to get several more of our track bearings welded. This will prove to be invaluable at competition. Today, (Saturday), we got our wall following running, and able to traverse the outer edge of the maze. Very great day! This coming week, we plan on finishing off the robot, and sending Robert on his way to a great chance of succeeding at nationals!!!! Till pen and paper meet again... The date is: Sat May 1 06:45:22 MDT 1999 Noise is not our friend. ANY QUESTIONS?!! Uh, we are going to stay up all night tonight to see what we can get. After fan motor overhual, we now have a fully functional death trixie. We'll see how things go... love, TRIXIE The date is: Thu May 6 14:24:23 MDT 1999 This has been a very nice week. We rested, and rested some more. We spent another all nighter working on the robot getting ready for the competition. I am so pleased with all of my team members. I had the wonderful opportunity to work with some of the most incredible people on this project. It has been an amazing experience. The project is now, at least with the hardware complete. We still have some work to do with the software to make sure that it is at a point that we can fully enter a room and extuinguish a fire. There is a great possibility that Trixie will be complete by the end of the summer. We still have the final report to complete which will be this weekend. Till pen and paper meet again..hah ha, they will never meet again for this semester.