Dafydd Watkins

February ’24 Blog

November ’23 Blog

This month I have been mainly focused on constructing a prototype circuit focused on the infrared sensors that we will eventually implement in our micro-mouse. These sensors will be vital for our robot to avoid obstacles in testing. I believe I’ve been successful in making the circuit work effectively and it has the desired functionality. the other task I have been mainly focused on is the coding for the base micro-mouse, after Xiaoyu had constructed the base design for the micro-mouse i implemented the code for it to be able to move forward, turn left and right in order to navigate around an obstacle. we had a problem initially where the robot would bump into an object then reverse turn 180 degrees and continue in a straight line. this would mean that the robot would constantly bump into the same objects, I was able to fix this problem by changing some value in the code so that the micro-mouse would turn less than 180 degrees each time it bumped into something. I am now solely focused on further bug fixes in the coding of our micro-mouse.

October ’23 Blog

Since the middle of October, we have been working on the micro-mouse project, to design a robot capable of following directions, obstacle avoidance and combat. The cohort was separated into separate groups assigned to use by the lecturers according to our skill set. I have been assigned to team hotel, we first allocated team roles via the skills matrix, all members of the team were eager to help and apply themselves where they felt they could do their best work and contribute to the project. I personally stepped forward to manage the project which will be a challenge, aside from that I will also be responsible for hardware and software design, sensors and I will also be helping with the website. So far in the labs I have been solely working on creating a circuit for the infrared sensors for the micro mouse. It has been a challenge, but I have learnt a lot about the components needed and how to implement them into the micro mouse effectively. I am excited to see the continuous development of this project.