Working on construction...

HC Design Complete

The HC design has been finished. Check out the SolidWorks picture!

Boat network is up

The internal network on the boat now has basic functionality, and all 3 PICs are on it. We pass messages around via SPI on our internal network. This adds to our current ability to talk to external sensors and radios over UART, and some basic SPI we had working for the last checkoff.

Electrical Design of DHC is Complete...

Today I thought through and finished designing (at least for a first generation) the Electrical design for the DHC. It is based on the previous sketches I had made with 3 PIC16F690s for control of the boat. See the schematics below and let me know what comments you have. Thanks!

--Ryan

PWM, Timer, Servo

A timer subsystem was created for the PIC. It activates Timers 0 and 1, with interrupts occurring on overflows on both. The timer module contains a function, using timer 1, which can retrieve the current system time in milliseconds. Timer 0 is used with a PWM module. Overflows on this timer increment a count inside the PWM module every 200 microseconds. This count is used to raise lines high and low, depending on the value of the count and the desired frequency and duty cycle of the PWM output. This PWM output is used to drive a servo, which will be used to display the crab count on the boat.

Got the Radios Chirping!

Over the course of the weekend I was able to get the XBEE radios communicating successfully bidirectionally, one on the PIC and one on the E128. Below is a picture of the setup for the HC, which it's LCD and Force Sensitive Resistor and Photocell and radio. And there is also a picture of the DCH's radio connected to a PIC, compiled in C.

Peter got the LCD working!

Peter did a great job writing the software and integrating the hardware for the LCD! You can see it below, and how it will show the crab pot ID's and accumulation rates for all 12 crab pots!

RFID reader works

We can now scan RFID cards and read the numbers off of them.

Design of Temporary system to get the boat moving...

Here is my plan for the barebones electronics to get the boat moving with a tether tomorrow. Let me know what you think about it. I'm just planning on using the joystick as an input to the E128, which will drive the motors through the TLE5206's, all off of one NiCad battery.

Pictures!

Preliminary Communications Diagram

First Meeting - Trying to wrap our heads around project...

We met briefly today after our first read-throughs of the project spec to start fleshing out our understanding of the requirements and some potential ideas for meeting them, as well as taking stock of what we currently have available and getting answers to some preliminary questions.

We looked at some old boats and determined that we'd better look into visiting some local hobby shops fairly quickly to see what kinds of RC boat parts are available for purchase. We also fleshed out what we believe to a fairly complete list of the requirements for the DCH (boat). See the picture below for a capture of this discussion.

We also started thinking about the microcontroller architecture for the DCH, and how one could potentially accomplish everything that needs to be done on the DCH with regard to communication. The diagram below lists one potential option, utilizing two PICS, which communicate with each other via SSP. Alternatively, an option utilizing 3 pics was also conceived of. Finally, we decided that it was probably worth spending some time fleshing out the capabilities of other PICS to see if we could find one microcontroller that could do all of what we needed. This larger PIC would require at least 2 UARTS and possibly 2 PWM channels if we wanted to do differential steering using two motors. It would only need two UARTS because it would probably be desirable to use another, smaller PIC to talk asynchronously to the RFID tag reader, because the project spec requires that the PIC doing so to be programmed in assembly language.

We broke to continue developing ideas and questions separately, and are scheduled to meet again Wednesday at 11:00 AM in the SPDL.

ME218C Project Begins!

The ME218C Project for Spring Quarter, 2010, has officially begun! The title of the project is "An Even Deadlier Catch," and it revolves around building boats and boat controllers. The boats navigate the Terman Pond, fishing for crab as a fleet through the novel use of RFID readers, swamping sensors, Xbee Zigbee radios, and a combination of PIC and HC12 microcontrollers.

This blog will serve as the official logbook for Team Domination Station, and here we will post findings and learnings from our various meetings and discussions.