March ’24 Blog
This month was spent mainly on the design and initial build of a our special feature which as a team we voted on which suggestion was presented by each member, we narrowed it down to either:
- Remote Control, using a HC-05 Bluetooth module
- IR sensor communication using our already built infrared sensors
We all decided to go with RC as it was considered an easier feature and less time consuming. Our initial prototype was a simple small breadboard that included 4 push buttons to act as the “Forward”, “Backwards”, “Slew left/right” for our micro mouse, these buttons were directly wired into 4 vacant pins of our pico board in order to test how well our mouse would move before thinking about going wireless. This was a success and a video of our initial prototype can be found in the Documents section of our website!
February ’24 Blog
Our main objectives for this month were to test and build our white line sensors which for our micro mouse would consist of 3 sensors each made up of simple circuit consisting of a small white LED and LDR. Despite some initial trouble with determining the voltage difference when our sensors were covered over a black surface and reflective white surface, we had our 3 sensors, with 2 placed at the front end and 1 at the back. With our PCB design complete the next step was to solder in the components that would form our infrared sensors. Once this was done, we ran some tests involving the Rohde and schwarz oscilloscope to look at the output of our waveforms to make sure that both sensors were working perfectly.
Leave a Reply
November ’23 Blog
This month we are to be assessed on the initial stages of the website, making sure that we have all the required pages available: Blogs from each members of the team for October & November as well as a teams page with a little introduction for each member of the team. We also started the testing of our Micro-mouses wall avoidance code before we added our infrared sensors meaning our mouse would be bumping into walls in order for the push bars to register and then our mouse would turn 180 degrees and continue moving in the opposite direction. A problem also became apparent as when moving in a straight line one of our wheels would move slightly slower than the other causing our mouse to partially steer in one direction which we would need to fix by modifying our code.
Leave a Reply
October ’23 Blog
This was the first month of the group project and to begin our team all discussed what are strengths were and from that we found what roles we all suited and just as importantly decided who our team manager to finish off our initial plan. The preceding weeks involved setting up our website to get a glimpse of how we would present all the experimentation and effort we would all be putting in, the beginning process of the main circuit utilizing all we had learned from the weekly experiments using the Raspberry pi pico.
Leave a Reply