Rhys’s Blog

During the month of November me and Ethan spent the majority of our time getting our micro mouse to run and have function touch bar sensors. We had a few set backs and plenty to troubleshoot. Firstly the tachometers on the motors were attached backwards and secondly the motors turn in the opposite direction as to the previous years motors. For the tachometers we carefully removed and flipped them and to have the motors move forward as intended we needed to alter some code. Finally our last issue was following the guidance of the handbook we wired the touch bars in a slightly different way which meant we had to make further minor adjustments to the code. After this was all complete we had a working micro mouse and it was very satisfying seeing our hard work in troubleshooting paying off. As a group we also looked at ethics in engineering which gave us all a better understanding of each other and how to conduct ourselves in the professional field of engineering.

The next steps will be to finalise testing of our IR sensors and breadboard components so they can be soldered to our PCB design which will be completed early next month. Following on to this we will integrate this onto our micro mouse and hopefully by the end of next month we will have functioning micro mouse with both touch bar and IR sensors., which is very exciting to see.

During this month we completed some team building exercises, then wrote our preferred roles and abilities down so we could be sorted into teams to start our micro-mouse project. For the first week together as a team we discussed are abilities and what our strengths are to the distribute roles. We made sure at least two were assigned to most roles so there is effective cover. I’ve taken a secondary role in the software and coding side of the project alongside Ethan, as well as, some project planning responsibilities with Dara. My primary responsibility will be the sensors on the micro-mouse. During the last two weeks of October I completed a bread-board circuit of two IR sensors, which can be seen in the image. Moving forward I will test the sensors sensitivity to make sure we have a pair of sensors with the closest matching level of sensitivity which can then be used in our micro-mouse.