The date is: Fri Jan 29 15:03:03 MST 1999 This week, after finalizing our group (Jack, Shawn, Michael and I) we signed for our equipment, chose our station and group number. This past week, the lectures were very informative. We held a meeting on Wednesday to discuss motor frequency and dividing up projects to aid in workload management. We also decided to use a differential drive system that is slightly altered to suit our needs. This coming week, I should begin on my current part of the project which is motor control, h-bridges, and PWM. Overall, I am pleased with our group's cohesiveness and discussion capabilities. C-ya on Tuesday. The date is: Fri Feb 5 12:02:50 MST 1999 This past week, I began to do some research on motor control and layout possibilities. I also began to do some of the number crunching involved with the PWM equations. Hopefully by Tuesday the 9th I'll have figured out how fast we think the robot should go along with most of the constants gathered from the motor data sheets. Jack and Shawn were pretty much preoccupied with getting the PWM onto an Altera Chip so we don't bog down the HC11 with unnecessary operations. Michael began to come up with a design using a 555 timer for sensor control. I also began looking at h-bridge configuration and number crunching to work on the particulars of the motor control. In theory, by next week, I'll have something to work with and will begin trying to configure the h-bridge package and will continue to help with the Altera and 555 designs if necessary. Until the next time..... The date is: Fri Feb 12 21:12:58 MST 1999 I apologize for the tardiness of this weekly report, I had a rare circumstance arise in my residence hall. This weeek, I crunched some of the numbers for the PWM simulation for the motor control speed. The 342 lectures on Wednesday and Friday helped immensely. I haven't decided if I'm going to use the damping and summation parts of the equation yet. That's probably going to depend on the rest of the drag on the robot due to mass of components. Shawn and Jack worked on the Altera PWM control .tdf file. Mike finished off our timer circuit and began inquiring into the fire sensing circuit. I think that is also almost finished. Nest week we'll be working on our Preliminary Design presentation slides on Sunday. With any luck, we'll finish them on Sunday and have a few practice runs through the presentation so we can anticipate questions from the faculty and students. I'll also have a working PWM difference equation and will focus primarily on the h-bridge circuitry because we need to get that working by mid-term. Again, sorry for the tardiness. C-ya on Tuesday... The date is: Fri Feb 19 13:42:45 MST 1999 Weekly report time again. This week was spent primarily on the preliminary design review presentation. We made a lot of slides and, of course, practiced what we were going to do. Overall, I think the presentation went well. I hope to get some pointers from this so that the final presentation will be even better. By the end of next week, I will have the h-bridge analysis and motor control equations complete, with the high possibility that circuit design and testing will begin. Otra vez, hasts... The date is: Fri Feb 26 17:16:34 MST 1999 This past week was a sort of "tie-up-loose-ends" week. With the realization that midterm functionality review is in essentially three weeks, we needed to start thinking about where we are and what we need to do to finish. I helped Jack and Shawn begin looking for a water gun for our fire extinguishing system. We hadn't even started on that system yet. We looked up various guns on the internet. At this point, Jack is volunteering to provide the group with a water gun he has at home. This will simplify the monetary consideration and acquisition of said gun. I also took a look at Mike's 555 timer circuit. This circuit is what we're using for the wall/floor sensing subsystems. He showed me what MicroSim had come up with for a schematic. I essentially re-drew a simpler version out by hand. Using this simpler version, Mike and I will etch the boards for these circuits next week. Motor control is currently stalled. We need to get the Altera chips from the order that was put in this morning before any more can be done with the PWM simulation. I have drawn up a layout for the h-bridge circuits. These boards, along with the sensor boards will be etched next week. Finally, we ran a test on our base to see if our motors run at about the same speed. We are pleased to announce that the motors run at the same speed propelling our robot in a straight line. This will make PWM a simple task. The only problem we ran into is that without the weight on the back of the robot, the coaster tended to bounce the base around. We hope that once we add our stuff to the base, the bouncing will subside. Next week: etching and soldering of h-bridge and sensor boards. Mounting soon to follow. The date is: Fri Apr 9 16:50:51 MDT 1999 This week was highly entertaining to all of us in group 007. We decided that the laughing we did was due to lack of sleep. As for the important stuff, we slightly redesigned the Altera PWM and Counter that we were using. We slightly overloaded the 84 pin Altera chip. We were using 32 of our 16 sharable expanders. Not a good thing. Since not all of it fit, we decided to move bits and pieces to the 44 pin chip and just wire wrap as necessary. We got both of the chips to compile successfully and with a little bit of work have FINALLY completed the motor control section. Shawn, Mike and I also began/continued writing pseudo code for the bot such that we think we have a working outline that just needs to be re-written in C. We had a minor glitch with the h-bridges. I soldered the catlytic capacitors in backwards so one of them blew. I also had a loose connection on pin 10 of the board. These were fixed and the h-bridges are now working perfectly. I even figured out how to mount them to the robot. Using two one inch standoffs, I can mount the h-bridge directly to the aluminum base. This will double as a heat sink and dissipate as much heat as necessary so as to not allow the h-bridges to blow up. Hopefully the theory is sound.... We've also essentially decided on how each of the subsystems will be mounted to the bot. High power stuff on the first level, hc11 and Altera on the top level and everything else in the middle. For next week, we will probably re-test the motor control to make sure it's working the way we think it should. We will also begin mounting systems to the chassis and encasing the existing chassis for noise reduction. All of this and the prospect of cod writing. OOOh it's going to be a fun week. The date is: Fri Apr 23 14:47:32 MDT 1999 Well, it's been a long week in the Junior Design category of things. On Tuesday, we figured out that our Altera PWM programs weren't working properly. Upon diagnosing the board, I figured out that power and ground were somehow wired together and that the left side of the 84-pin Altera Chip was improperly wired. We messed with the program a little bit to come up with something better. As it turns out, we are using 126 of our 128 logic cells on the 84-pin and 63 out of 64 on the 44-pin. We just found a bigger crowbar to stuff things into it with. Jack was in the lab today, I couldn't make it due to class conflict, etc., however, I heard from him that the PWM program works!!! All we need to do is hook it up and we're good to go. So essentially, we've done in one semester what one of the Sr. Design groups has been trying to do for two. Mike was fooling around with the 2D12's yesterday. The verdict is still out on that one. Coming up on the last week, we don't have much time for testing, but I think we'll be OK. As long as we get it moving, we'll be fine. The group will be in lab most of the day tomorrow to work on the final presentation, the report, and anything else that comes up. Hopefully, all will go well from here on out. Next week, we're going to have to mount the rest of the stuff and have a few test runs. Other than that, not much new. One more to go.... The date is: Fri Apr 30 16:13:12 MDT 1999 Back for yet another weekly report. This week has been especially busy due to the preparation for the presentation and competition tomorrow. This week, I re-wire wrapped the Altera board for motor control (third try), worked diligently on presentation slides and practice (we need it), and helped mount stuff to the chassis. Using our NEW design, we fed the motor control stuff into the EPM7128ALC84-12 chip and dislodged the EPM7032LC64-10 and added two more bus lines. Wire wrapping included desired and actual speeds for both left and right motors, and 7 auxiliary lines. Mounitng design was finally finished. We decided to put the HC11, the Altera board and the fire board. The second level consists of the wall sensors, and the line and wall sensor board. The first level contains everything else (motors, ground strip, h-bridges, power board, water supply, water pump, etc.). Next week, we'll go through final design review, and prepare the final report paper due on the 11th. The date is: Fri May 7 08:43:27 MDT 1999 Last weekly report for the year. This week, we just basically worked on the final report that's due on Tuesday. We finished cleaning out the closet yesterday. On tuesday, we basically made the bot look presentable for final design review. As for details of the report, I'm going to do the title page, abstract, table of contents, bibliography, the budget, the h-bridges, and probably some of the HC11 code data for the paper. Shawn has been working on PWM, and various other parts, Jack has started with Chassis design, and Mike has been working on the sensors. Let's just say next week, I'm going to sleep. Provided my residents don't want me to check them out of their rooms at 8 a. m. This qualifies as the end of the semester. Other than that, I had fun in class (most of the time) and would look forward to trying it again sometime in the future.