Posted: The Electrical Hardware group, although missing a third of its members, boomed with progress this past Saturday. Having a prepared list to follow was most helpful and I highly recommend it.
Working on the electronic components of a robot that does not exist yet is not a simple task, but as the situation always is, the programming team and our group, working closely together, must do so. Some may see this time without the robot as a troublesome dead space that can lead to unproductivity, and later, a rushed setup of controls in the robot. As this can too easily be the case, I have tried as electrical hardware manager to always keep my team working hard on planning, learning, and actively working with the programming team. This has been achieved thus far by learning more programming concepts this year as well as assembling a rough controls setup to be put in the chassis to practice driving as soon as the wheel parts are made.
After working on the fundamentals of LabVIEW (the software chosen for programming the robot this year) last week along with solving formulas to discover how to code our acceleration control, the group split from the programming group who worked on a program for turning the robot and camera tracking. Electrical Hardware decided to embark on the tedious task of creating a much needed power distribution diagram in Inventor, thus we had to learn some of those skills. We also outlined the probable functions of the robot for the joystick and the corresponding buttons.
Another task we accomplished was making a price list of all parts we needed to order for our group. Inventory, research of where to order purchases, and prices were all needed to hand off to our finance member to put in an excel spreadsheet.
Towards the end of the meeting the group was able to do some soldering of sensors and we plan to discuss these at the next meeting. Plans for next meeting also include finishing a signal diagram of controls as well as creating a 3D image in inventor of controls in the orientation they will be in the robot.
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