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
- Progress?
- 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 IDEA: Butterworth (low pass filter) - same performance with fewer samples
- New Lookup Table - Dan, Austin
- needs to be updated to match new rangefinder info
- Filter - Brad, Emily, Chris, John, James
- 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