S2 | Week 2 - Lightning Talk Presentations

In this week's session, all of the groups had prepared their own respective Lightning Talk presentations. Each group proceeded to present their progress thus far and the direction they were planning on taking their project.

After presentations ended, we met with our respective sub-groups and discussed what should be done next. We also were able to finalize our Bill of Materials.


Coby, Ben, and I also took the solar panel sheet, which is next to the old 1/12 scale track, outside in order to test it under the sun. We connected the battery charger we had to it to confirm its functionality for Maker Fair when were outside, possibly away from any outlets.

We're currently all researching and looking into Processing so that we can make a GUI that can interact with the podcars, our Arduino, and our Xbee units. The Summer 2016 Korean team had made a UI using Processing so we're diving in and trying to understand how their code works as well.

Semester 2 | Week 1 - First meeting of the semester

Today marks the first day of our last semester working Spartan Superway. First, all the senior project classes met at ENGR 189 to recap on what is expected of all seniors in our presentations and final documentations. Afterwards, we all went to the Spartan Superway Warehouse and had our general meeting to see where things are with the project as a whole.

 We were then informed that we have to prepare a Lightning Talk presentation for next Wednesday to catch the rest of the teams up on our progress thus far.

Week 16 - Presentation 3

This week in class, we presented our last presentation for the semester. We basically communicated to the class our final design concepts, our plans for next semester, and our dependencies and contingencies. The presentations took up most of the time and afterwards, everyone said their goodbyes for the semester and disbanded.

Week 15 - Presentation 3 (viewings)

This week, we sat back and watched most of the Full scale team and the small scale track team present final designs and their progress thus far. It seems like everyone is on track with getting their rapid prototypes completed on time. There was a special camera guy there today getting some good-quality footage, so it looks like we'll be documenting our presentations with greater quality now.

After presentations, we all went back to our sub-teams and we ended up uploading our code to a board and attaching the set-up to the Bogie teams rapid prototype. We ended up with some good footage of the two individual projects coming together in the end.

We will be preparing for our third and last presentation that we'll be presenting next week (12/6/17).

Week 14 - Thanksgiving Break

No session this week. We all started looking into the rubric for Presentation 3, which begins next session (11/29/17)

Week 13 - Rapid Prototype Coming Together

This week we were able to use a backing plate to mount our components onto. We mounted on the Arduino Mega, breadboard, servo, and motor which we can use to demonstrate our code.

We also tried running the mobile app with the podcars and we started getting a new error for no reason. We hadn't changed anything but now the process goes on like it's supposed to until the ticket is purchased and the thread is created in Firebase. After 10-20 seconds, we'd get an error in the Command Prompt. Jeremy and I couldn't make anything of it and so Jeremy took down some notes on what was going on and took it home with him.

We got a tip from Dr. Furman for using an alternative to the UI interface for the podcar system. He recommended looking into the language called Processing, which can be used to code graphical interfaces.

Week 12 - Getting some goals accomplished

This week we were finally able to get our XBee modules communicating through serial communication. We were able to get a master module and 2 slave modules set up on our computers and experimented with how the slave modules couldn't communicate with each other and only the master module could communicate with the 2 slave modules. 

So far, we have our Arduino, Xbee, motors, servo, and RFID reader connected to a breadboard and interacting with each other. This is a good chunk of what our rapid prototype will consist of so this is good progress.