This blog was created to describe the evolution of our Computer Engineering course final project. We are students from ISMAT - Instituto Manuel Teixeira Gomes, in Portimão, Portugal.
Also, with this blog, we hope we can contribute to the understanding of some of the concepts we used and to report the obstacles we encountered and how we came to solved them (or not).
Sunday, June 03, 2012
:: Major milestone achieved ::
This weekend revealed itself as very good weekend in terms of closed items. It was our milestone to close all the operations/functionalities of the Chasso robot and also of Maria. We were having some problems during the last two weeks, but everything came together when we most needed it to be. We came just in time to close this milestone on the planned date.
Maria
We finally reunited all the conditions required to test the console App on Maria, using the I7 PC. In terms of performance we got a small improvement just because of the new processor (the other was an I5), but after some changes on the code to use more cores and taking advantage of the multithreading capabilities of the machine, and also some changes on the Chasso timers to read the sensors (because they are slow) we manage to get the performance to the level we wanted initially.
Having this problem solved, we then tested the usability of the application on Maria, because of the touchable surface. We encountered some problems on it's sensitivity, so we went to do some changes again on Maria. This time we added another camera, taking advantage of the new NUI Group (Natural User Interface Group) freeware driver's 1.5 version, that adds this multi camera functionality. Problem solved! With each camera covering half of the surface, we eliminated the light reflex and also increased the sensitive. We now have what we think is Maria 99% done! Everything is working smoothly and has expected on an amateur surface table, mounted with only this resources. There are small issues, like the need of calibration according to the light on the room, but nothing that can't be done every time we need to use it.
Chasso
The quadratic spiral search, the parallel search and the track points navigation functions are now made and tested. We could say that everything went almost very well, if it wasn't for the differences on the compass readings near walls and metal sources. This misreadings make the odometer to not work very well, but we can say the results are very good, for a proof of concept.
We just add one more little lego piece to the robot. With this piece on the back of the camera battery we managed to get the robot more stable when turning.
Also final touches were made to the record video functionality. It's now fully working.
Julio
The C# class to receive the GPS coordinates from the Android mobile phone to be mounted on top of Julio is now done and tested.
