#megblog

back again?

Time is running out! We realised this month we really had to pull our socks up and get on track because we’ve got a lot to do and not much time to do it in.

Through the month I kept up to date with our week 15, 16, 17 and 18 weekly blogs and moaned at everyone as per usual to get their February blogs done.

Tom and I designed circuit for LED special feature on breadboard, testing what value resistors we needed for each colour and how many LED’s we could use without drawing too much current and using up our battery. After getting a circuit that works, I helped Tom solder the circuit onto veroboard as our first attempt to attach to the micromouse. It worked really well and Matt was about to code it really quickly. So now we can use that until we made a final light board to place them exactly where they’re needed.

As a team we worked together to decide which colours we would like for each mode, function and action it does within the mode and I’ve put them on the Team Echo blog if you’d like to see what we chose.

We finally filmed our third Vlog! But we had a bit of an issue. Where we filmed it the first time, the sound quality was terrible so we had to film it again. It was good I had organised it all the first time because we knew exactly what points we had to discuss again. This attempt went much better and hopefully we’ll have it edited and uploaded by the time we come back after Easter.

We decided to have switches to change the mode of the micromouse instead of having to load up different code for each one. Me and tom found some switches and designed a circuit, then helped solder them onto veroboard. Matt then coded it and we have a new special feature! Easy as that.

February was catch up month, we’d missed all of January and half of December so we needed to get moving. I spent the first session organising the team ready for the new term, what we had completed, what needed to be done, who needed to focus on what. I also worked on writing up all the blogs from around the deadline period that we missed, as well as week 11, 12, 13 and 14 blogs for February. I then had to go through the website formatting and fixing slight issues because everything was formatted slightly wrong from how we’d done it so far.

I also decided we needed more photos on our website so put loads of photos or team and progress from our lab sessions onto the gallery and news feed to make the website a bit fuller and more colourful.

I then spent some time gathering together everything we’d accomplished in the last few weeks and planned our third Vlog. We all had certain sections to discuss and it made sure we got all of our information in. Go have a look if you haven’t watched it already.

On the website we need to have loads of documentation in our public documents folder. We decided to split this up so that everyone wrote about the things they had concentrated most. The documentation will need to be done by the time we go to Gregynog, so these will be given out as a deadline for the Easter holidays.

This month we did lots of brain storming about how we could fit the Pacman ghost shell so that we could start actually designing it. I came up with an idea to have it fixed at the top and able to move on springs around the micromouse but we decided that although it would be an impressive design, it would be very difficult for us to actually implement.

This was very much a month to get back into the swing of things and sort out everyone’s plans for the rest of our project. Now we’re back on track everything will get a bit more exciting when our plans come together to create the final product.

We didn’t get any work done on Clyde during January because we had exams and revision all month instead. We had three exams which were:

- Electrical Machines 1

- Electronic Materials and Devices

- Electromagnetics

I’m just waiting for the results on the 4th of February now to see how I did.

Back to work on the micromouse next week when lab sessions start again and we have loads to do. We need to get all the code done soon so we can start testing it, and we need to make more progress on our special features because they have fallen behind slightly.

The special features we have decided to do are:

- Lights which change colour depending on what is happening to the micromouse

- A pacman ghost shaped shell made on the 3D printer to have the lights diffusing through

I’m really looking forward to seeing these coming together so we’ll put up any achievements with these on our news page.

December is finally here and we had 2 weeks to get everything sorted ready for us leaving for seven weeks over Christmas and exams.

I spent a lot of time organising everything we had done so far and getting everything sorted for the progress assessment in the last week of term, which I think went really well! As well as the progress assessment, we had a class microcontroller interface test, testing our knowledge of the coding needed for our micromouse and everything we had learnt in lectures so far this term. That took up most of a lab session so we didn’t have as much time as we hoped to work on Clyde.

I concentrated on filling up the website before we went away, writing up and adding lots of documentation onto the public documents page of the website, writing up blogs for week 9 and 10, and annoying the rest of the team to get their December blogs sorted!

Now it’s time to leave poor Clyde for 7 weeks while we revise and endure the dreaded January exams. Wish us all luck, we need it!

Our micromouse has been named Clyde!

We’ve accomplished much more this month than in October. Everyone is really getting into the swing of working as a team to come up with ideas and discuss the advantages and possible disadvantages of everyone’s thoughts. We all still get on really well as a group and do work outside of our labs as well. Even though half of our micromouse lab sessions have been taken up by microcontroller-interfacing tasks, we’re still making good progress towards our final goals.

At the start of the month I was asked to draw the IR circuit of the micromouse on multisim, so after spending 3 hours of getting grumpy at an inanimate object, I completed it! Woooh! Then Matt, our team leader, found out I never had to draw it in the first place… I know. But swings and roundabouts, at least I know how to use multisim more competently now.

I bought an RGB LED light strip (mostly to decorate my room), but also because we’re using these LED’s inside Clyde as our special feature, so we wanted to test what materials we can use to diffuse the light within him. We need to look into this even more next month and hopefully make a decision before Christmas.

In terms of my roles of documentation and website (helper), I’ve written weeks 5, 6, 7, and 8 of our team echo blogs, put our very first picture of our lovely Clyde up online, and came up with the idea to have a comments and gallery page which our webmaster coded perfectly! I then created our project plan in the form of a Gantt Chart which has now been added to our public documents page, so now people can check up on us and see if we’re sticking to our plans or not.

We also found out we had to have our website assessed at the very end of this month, so I took it into my own hands to organise all the criteria and make checks that we had it all up and running. I’m pretty sure we’re going to absolutely nail it, so will put it on here how well we do.

Clyde is looking promising!! Hopefully he’ll be alive and moving around by next month…