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Status Updates: 10/9/09

Week of 10/3/09 - 10/9/09

  • Lab2 - Hunter-Prey
    • Progress?
      • Finite State Machines might be useful
    • Reference Robot - Abe, Nico
  • Analog Improvements - Evan, James
    • speed up analog (don't sample all ADC ports, use bitmask)
    • run all enabled ports in the analog loop, including BOM
      • can disable BOM when not needed using bitmask
    • Only return fresh readings
      • Requires flag in library to indicate freshness of all analog values
      • Indicate stale values with error codes
    • Speed up the ADC Clock
      • Need to do empirical tests to figure out noise from faster clock
      • James wants 1-2 people to help with the tests (maybe after the labs are done)
  • Rangefinder Improvements
    • Filter - Brad, Emily, Chris, John, James
      • NEW IDEA: Butterworth (low pass filter) - same performance with fewer samples
        • We still need a ring buffer
      • Figure out how many values to save (configurable parameter?)
        • Variable-sized buffer, only return valid values once buffer is full
        • Use a running sum to generate average in constant time
        • Populate buffer and compute running sum in interrupt
        • Divide to get average value in the rangefinder call
      • Have both immediate and filtered values available
      • We should write the API (header file) and have someone younger write the source file
    • New Lookup Table - Dan, Austin
      • needs to be updated to match new rangefinder info
  • BOM Updates
    • Evan scoping BOM 1.0 on Robot 10
    • BOM 1.5 without RSSI hardware are working
  • xbee tests - David
    • simple test works (initialize xbee, get xbee id)
    • problems with multiple initializations
      • seems to get stuck in an infinite loop waiting for a response when entering command mode the second time
      • current workaround - just initialize xbee once
      • explicitly leave command mode after test is complete
  • SURG - should we do it?
    • Consensus answer: No. Not enough interest and time.
  • Wireless Bootloading - Ryan
    • To program wirelessly
    • In the repository
    • Need USB XBee dongle to computer
    • Programs directly over USB if no XBee dongle is plugged in
    • Might be problems with multiple programs downloading simultaneously (interference)
    • To come:
      • Program multiple robots in chains
      • Enter bootloader via specific wireless packet
  • Dues and T-Shirts
    • Make sure you have paid your membership dues ($25) and gotten your free t-shirt
  • Part Order List
    • Rangefinder - Jimmy

colony_analog.txt View (1.76 KB) Chris Mar, 10/07/2009 08:51 PM

Colony_FSM_20080919.ppt (704 KB) Chris Mar, 10/11/2009 11:40 PM