Weekly Progress update

1-14-2011
So this first week I got several important things taken care of. The first thing I did was to solder and integrate the killswitch into the rest of the power circuitry. I also added an LED to indicate whether or not it was engaged.

The next thing I did was to integrate the joystick program I had made with the servo controls to get the joystick driving the platform remotely.
Right away we realized that something was wrong with the steering as it pulled hard left, and no amount of programming seemed to fix it entirely. This issue plagued us for several days. After playing with the mechanical side of the steering mechanism, I discovered that the amount that the suspension is compressed changes how much the platform veers left. So I added some zip ties to compress the springs more, and now it drives nearly perfectly straight.

We started testing the driving again, this time at full power, but after about 5 minutes, the robot stopped working. The killswitch mosfet had overheated, detached from the heatsink and died. I needed to replace it and find a way to cool it better. Today, I replaced it, and attached it to a larger heatsink with a built in fan (It's actually a compact CPU cooler :P). After that, I tested it out by driving it around on the grassy hill next to bldg 60 at full power. I found that at full speed, tipping is a serious concern, as it flipped over twice. Next week I plan on modifying the driving code so that the steering sensitivity varies inversely with the speed to help reduce this risk.

The last thing I did was getting a program running with pygame so an image of a robot could be moved around on a satellite image background with the joystick. I also got started on implementing this code with the gps and got the image to move around according to the gps data, but not accurately.