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.
