Helena Project Update 16

Week 9

Project Update 16

Progress

My primary goal this week was to get an initial mapping of the C-Space. I met this goal. On Tuesday I met with Pathing and Automation to start work on the Arduino code to map the C-Space. They had a start to it with three motors on interrupts and printing their values to Serial out. Unfortunately, the Arduino UNO only has two interrupt pins, so I had to switch one of the motors to poll instead of interrupt. This took a few tries, but by Thursday, which is when we met next, I had a motor polling instead of interrupting. I had also fixed the print statements to be more useful to us. However the code still had some bugs. We ran out of time on Thursday and had to go to the All-Team meeting, so we met up the next day as well. On Friday I finished debugging the Arduino code and we were finally ready to map the C-Space. I ran the arm all around the payload so we now have an initial data set on the shape of the C-Space to play with.

Plans

My next step in the software is to write a parser for the C-Space data. It is currently in the form of one motor angle per line, with the triples separated by a line with a semicolon on it. So I will go from:

theta1 theta2 theta3 ;

to:

point_n = <0, theta1, theta2, theta3>

I will have a 4D array of 1's, then fill in a 0 in every location indicated by point_n above. The 4D C-Space will then contain a 0 for every valid configuration of motors and a 1 for every invalid configuration.

Once I have an initial C-Space, I will need to do some repair on it to smooth out the C-Space. This will account for angles that are valid but were not sampled.

My other goal for Week 10 is to help the ME's test the payload. They are all finishing up their capstone class, so they need to have a bunch of tests done to show that their parts of the project work. They will need some help from CS and EE in order to test how their hardware parts all work in motion. I will be helping them to write code to move the arm and to devise test cases.

Problems

I currently have way too many projects going on. All of my classes have final projects, so I am worried that I will not have time to get it all done.