S2 | Week 7 - Team meetings

(3/7/18) This week's meeting was for all the sub-teams to continue working on whatever tasks they needed to complete. 

We added some more features to our GUI so now, the user can choose the station they want to travel to, or get picked up at, then select the podcar they wish to choose, and finally they can choose "Request Pod" for the request to be sent to the podcar via Xbee modules.

I have been trying to implement our options menu, however, I can't seem to get the chosen option to correctly pass through to my function so that the correct station number can be written to our instructions array.

* Our instructions array consists of 2 elements. The first corresponds to the station number to be traveled to and the second element corresponds to the podcar chosen to go to said station.

S2 | Week 6 - Presentation 1 (2nd set of teams)

(2/28/18) This week's meeting consisted of the rest of the teams presenting their first presentations, which took up most of the time. After we got updates on all the sub-teams' progress and planned next steps, we got together with our respective sub-teams and discussed what we wanted to do next.

The multi-podcar capabilities were added to the GUI and what I really wanted to do next was to take the 14 buttons that represented the different stations along the track and combine them into an options menu. This will make our GUI look more compact and less clunky.

S2 | Week 5 - Presentation #1

In this week's meeting (2/21/18), we were the 2nd group to present our 1st presentation. The first 5 groups were to get 10% extra credit so that's why we chose to go on the first day. After watching the rest of the groups' presentations, we met with our respective sub-teams to discuss what our next steps would be.

We decided to further develop our Python GUI and add options to choose a specific pod to travel to the designated station that the user chooses. (Multi-pod capabilities)

S2 | Week 4 - Valentine's Day AE Presentation

This week's meeting mainly took place in ENGR 189 again, where Dr. Furman presented on how to use the Assertion-Evidence method of presenting. After this presentation, all of the classes split up into their respective project groups and classrooms. We went back to the warehouse and the sub-groups got together to touch base.

Ben was able to make a basic GUI using Python and we decided to expand on it and further learn the language. Therefore, our GUI will now be written in Python as opposed to Processing.

S2 | Week 3 - More research on GUI

In this week's meeting, we took a group photo of the Spartan Superway Team and we watched a presentation about ATN's/PRT's in Sweden.

With the rest of the time we had, we got together and kept going through the Processing code to try and make more sense of it. We then began discussing the possibility of exploring and using another language to build our UI with. We agreed to take a look at Python as well in the upcoming weeks to determine whether it was a viable alternative for us to use.

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.