S2 | Week 14 - More testing/ PCB soldered

In this weeks meeting (4/25/18), Coby was able to get our first PCB soldered and ready to go. We tried it out with our podcar and everything seemed to be in order.

We had some trouble with the podcar going from the inner loop to the outer loop because of an elevation difference between the rails. Later we found out that the Track team still has to put on a half bracket to stabilize the transition.

I've also been working on getting the Arduino to write a message to the XBee so that we could read the message in Python and print the location of the pod once it has reached its destination.

S2 | Week 13 - General meeting for Engineering Ethics

This week (4/18/18), we met in ENGR189 to go over the 3rd ME 195B paper we had to write, which involved implementation of the Engineering Code of Ethics.

After the meeting, we went to the warehouse and tested our podcar on the track. The Track team was able to deliver their turn section portion so we were able to successfully test our steering arm. There were a few problems with the PCB because we were using the old one from last year.

However, in the upcoming weeks, we will be soldering the new PCBs so we can test them out.

S2 | Week 12 - Presentation 2

This week (4/11/18), all the sub-teams presented their 2nd Presentations.

We were able to show everyone our progress and showed a video of how we could request a station, using our GUI which was loaded onto a Raspberry Pi, and have our control system work like we had been describing to them.

We watched all the other groups present and by the end, there wasn't too much time left so we decided to meet at our usual time on Friday.

S2 | Week 11 - Waiting to test our control system

(4/4/18) In today's meeting, we wanted to test our control system on the track, however the bogie was not quite done yet and the same goes for the turning section of the track. However, the new, smaller-width straight portion of the track was there for us to try out. We tried using the first prototype of the bogie, however the width was too great and the bogie would get stuck when attempting to pass the stability clamps on the track.

Ben and I took the bogie and sanded down the sides to a point where after we assembled the axle and wheels, the bogie would be able to barely fit through the stability clamps.

Meanwhile, Coby was working with the new podcar prototype to get all of our components set up and he made sure everything was fitting correctly, etc.

We are hoping to test our control system on the turning section of the track in our next session. We're also preparing for Presentation 2, which is taking place next week as well.

S2 | Week 10 - SPRING BREAK

There is no meeting on 3/28/18 because we will be on break.

During the break, were just cleaning up our Python and Arduino code and making sure everything is in order.

S2 | Week 9 - Improvements made on the Python GUI

(3/21/18) In our meeting today, Coby and Ben were setting up our GUI on the Rasberry Pi and displaying it on the TV, while trying to troubleshoot and fix scaling issues.

I continued to work on the options menu and I finally found a solution which passes the selected station to my function! From there, I compared the selection to strings labeled Station 01 - Station 14, and based on which station matches, the corresponding Station number then gets written to our instructions array.

So now, we have a functional options menu, which greatly simplified the aesthetics of our GUI, while also simplifying our Python code by about 20-25 lines.

S2 | Week 8 - 'Global Economy and Social Impacts' meeting

(3/14/18) This week's meeting took place in Room ENGR 189, where Dr. Hsu gave a presentation about how outsourcing work to countries like India and China can create a sort of global economy. Because of the time differences, there could technically be people working on whatever project 24 hours a day, where 8 hours are worked in each country. He went on to explain how this could help stimulate our own economy, as well as the other countries, while continuing to create more of a middle class in places like India and China by giving the poor jobs to help them make money so they could start affording the products that they are helping make. 

We made our way back to the SSW warehouse, agreed to continue working on personal assignments until we have a bogie and track to test our control system on, and left. 

After more research, the options menu is still not functional. I'm still having the same problem where I can't get the chosen option to pass through to my function. Either no value is passed through, or it's always the first option (Station 1) that is passed through. I'll keep researching and trying to figure out a solution.