Week 9 - Watching Presentation 2

This week in our meeting, we were able to see the Full-scale and Half-scale progress thus far via their Presentation 2. This pretty much took up the whole meeting time and we were left with about 15-25 minutes afterwards to discuss our Bill of Materials and who will be ordering the parts we had agreed on. Once we receive these parts, we can then start assembling a breadboard mock-up of our control system to demonstrate the functionality of our code.

Week 8 - Presentation 2 and Swfit Nav Meeting

In this weeks meeting, 10/18/17, we were able to brief the rest of the Spartan Superway team on our progress, specs, and future plans. The presentation can be found under Week 8 on our group blog, found here.

In the beginning of the session, Dr. Furman told us about an ME 106 group that is currently incorporating GPS into their end-of-semester project and that representatives from Swift Navigation will be coming to have a meeting with them about their product, the Piksi Multi, which the students are using. We, the Controls team, were told that we could sit in on the meeting, mainly because the idea of GPS has been thrown around for position sensing in the Small-scale team, as well as the Full-scale team. The meeting was informative for us but didn't really contribute to what we are working on currently. Maybe a group in the future can devote more of their time to GPS if they feel that it is a necessity in the (small-scale) project.

I'm currently trying to troubleshoot to see whether all conencting pieces (nodes) between my computer and the podcar are working correctly. We hope to soon have the capability to purchase a ticket and have a given podcar go from station to station.

Week 7 - Getting Components to Communicate

For this weeks meeting, 10/11/17, we were told that our Presentation 2 was to be presented the next week, 10/18/17. After being briefed, by Dr. Furman and Ron Swenson, on where we're at as a whole, we went to our workstation and began trying to get everything working together. 

Last week, on Thursday, 10/5/17, I was finally able to get the port opened on my Mac. The problem wasn't an incorrect directory in the server.js file or anything. I solved the problem by using '$npm install serialport' in my Terminal. I recently purchased a windows laptop and I was able to open the port on there as well. 

After we were able to get the port opened, we got a message that read: 

"

$ node ./server.js

Port opened

New ticket detected!

userId: LLSCYWTgVKOhTUDD3sGgZ9LyAIc2, firstName: Testy, lastName: The Testing Tester1

addUserToPodSchedule()

spawning client

status: 100

client for podNum 1 has sent command: 01060203

client for podNum 1 has sent command: 01020008

"

After setting everything up in the warehouse, we tried purchasing tickets to send the podcars from station to station, however it didn't work as fluidly as expected. I believe the pod isn't reading it's position so it doesn't know where to go. There are also 2 RFID checkpoints that aren't on the track because we've been using them for RFID read/write testing. I thought if we try putting them back it'll work but no luck. 

We're currently in the process of checking all the nodes that connect everything wireless to see if the problem lies there. A node is any connecting piece (e.g. My computer, usb cable connecting master Xbee to my computer, the XBee master itself, the arduino, the XBee slave on the arduino, etc.) 

We contacted the old team to see if there is a more clear way the view what is communicated between devices other than the message posted above, however it seems that not much else can be readily and easily viewed. 

Week 6 - All-Hands Meeting / Brief Meet-up

Before this week's meeting (10/4/17), all ME195A students had to meet at ENGR189 because professor Winncy Du was scheduled to give a presentation on how to go about writing our final reports for our respective projects. After the presentation was over, we had to take a quiz about different aspects of the presentation (e.g. Differences between Abstract and Executive Summary, how to cite certain sources, etc.). A lot of the presentation consisted of things that I had learned before, but it was a nice refresher and it gave all of us a clear idea of where to find all the documents necessary in order to write our final paper with clearer direction.

After the presentation and quiz, we met up at the SSW Warehouse for our regular sub-team meetings. At this point, I was able to get the mobile app running, the XBees connected to each other, as well as access to Firebase (to view ticket purchases made by the mobile app and destination information about the podcar). The only thing we couldn't get to work was opening the port that the XBee was connected to by using '$ node ./server.js'.

In order to get this to work, all I was supposed to do was change the port directory in the server.js file, found in the SSW-master repository. I'm using a Mac and in the tutorial, the previous group was able to get the port opened on windows, so I am continuing my attempts to get the port opened on my computer so that we can initiate communications with the podcars. I emailed Shane again and he was able to add our controls group to an email thread with himself, as well as the small-scale mobile app crew from 2016-2017. Hopefully they can help with opening the port.