Colony

Colony General Meeting
Friday, November 3rd

• Marching Band
  • Demo
    • Robots communicate to synchronize, play music together and march together.
    • Moves and music are hard coded.
    • No encoders mean that turning is inaccurate.
      • Use BOM to stay allinged
• ColoNet
  • Wireless library
    • Makes the server connect to the token ring
    • Compiles (mostly) but has not been tested <Sarcasm> Mostly done </Sarcasm>
    • Done in Eugene style but the implementation is the same
    • Need to start thinking about the base station's role in the ring and be special
  • Server application
    • Basic server made
    • Greg collaboration needed
  • Rich Command set
    • Tell robots what to do wirelessly
      • Will be standardized
  • Wireless Programming
    • Dirty hack: "Best of Colony" Behavior
• New Robot
  • Works so far
  • Will work out kinks on the sea-saw effect
  • Will talk to Brian about making more boards and LCDs
  • On schedule to send out the boards on Monday
• Auto-Recharge Circuitry
  • Issues
    • AVR does not recognize that the battery needs to be charged
    • Removed the Tiny and it still does not work (.5A max)
      • No feedback so diagnosing is impossible
    • Going to change some components
    • Deadline may slip, daughterboard may happen
      • Switch to another AVR (bigger tiny?)
        • Will require code rebuilding
  • Locate Station
    • Merging with locate
      • Using orbit and beacon right now, plan to use homing next
        • Orbit is cool because Feng made it and it has a cool control law
        • Need two orbits to make it stable...
      • Only using the turning part now. Not actually orbitting
    • Homing
      • Lots of noise in the sensors
      • Different angles do not help
      • Get better sensors, Part research time
• Photovore
  • Checking the bad sensor helps
  • But the bad sensor is messed up
  • Get rid of the analog buffering
    • But can't get the photovoring without the buffering
    • Work on cooperative part first, photovore will come next
• File System
  • Done, just need to clean up
  • Need to add things like the sin table etc
  • There's a fancy menu to browse
  • Added a new button function
    • Detects a button click: waits until the button is released before returning a 'hit'
    • Will be added to the firefly+ lib/dio.c
  • Will be commented well
• New Wireless
  • Change your baud rate!
    • Now it is 15200 instead of 9600
  • If you do not change this in your behavior, it will die a painful death. Repeatedly.
• Colony Plan
  • Now on the repository
  • Check it out from the repository for the most updated
  • One folder up from the code directory
  • In the documents folder next to code
• Robots
  • Robot 0 should get a BOM

• You should've gone to the party which is in 30 minutes.

• 21 People, Including Grads and Advisor.