October Blog

In October we began by being debriefed on about what the course was about. This was the process of building a micro mouse which we would work in a group of 4 to build which we would to together on the project every Thursday. By the second week we had already established team India and began working on the project planner where we planned out the following tasks including, working together to submit a team contract, establishing the website and designing the PCB for the micro mouse all of these tasks were split fairly between my team members to maximise the efficiency of the project. By the 24th of October we had completed the base of the project plan and submitted our team contract. During this time we also built the IR circuit on a breadboard for future use on the project, we were also introduced to proteus were me and Huw would then build the IR circuit for the PCB while Ben and Bernice would work on the website

Going back every Tuesday we were again debriefed on the other part of the module which included working with a microcontroller called the Raspberry Pi Pico were we would learn about and complete experiments by the end of October I had completed up to experiment 4.  

 

November Blog

In November we began work on the website initial assessment and PCB design of IR circuit the circuit we used as a reference when building the PCB was on the handout given to using this and a software called proteus we manged to create the PCB circuit quite early on in November. we then moved on and focused all our effort into the website by adding menus each with there own information including this monthly blog and others. Until November 19th every Tuesday I was completing and working on the experiments given on canvas and getting them graded on completion. I then finished all these experiments it provided great help and knowledge that i can apply and use on the micro mouse project. But now that i completed them i can fully focus on the micro mouse.

December Blog 

This month we began full working on the micromouse we designed and completed the PCB design as well as adding the basic physical parts of the mircomouse like the wheels we also add pillairs to the base of the mircomouse to be able to attach the rapsberry pico board higher up I then soldered the componets to complete the pcb board and attached it to the mircomouse after wired up and uploaded the code to the mircomouse to perform obstacle aviodance while we did make a lot of progress forr the limited time we had this month before the break we could’t quite get the obstacle avoidance to work the reason behind this was mainly poor soldering issues causing fault connections which caused a lot of delay. 

January Blog

We only had a week in January thanks to exams so not much progress was made other than beginning to look at the line following process and plan accordingly

February Blog

This was our busiest we made alot of progress this including managing to fix the pcb soldering a getting a functional obstacle avoidance to work as well we began planning and solding the linefollowing board that include LDR sensors and LED to get the Line following working however we did encounter many issues again with this including faluty connetcions again as well as we used to big of LED that the wheels coun’t reach the floor. After we got that fixed we calibrated the two front LDR to get the treshold values which we did, But we struggled with being able to control the speed of the wheels as one turned faster than the other causing it to not even move in a straight line regardless of it it saw a white line or not. So it wasn’t perfect so for the rest of february we tried getting the code to work accurately so we would have a good enough line following. 

March Blog

During this month we managed to finish the line following task and complete the required criteria before we moved on to combat we worked on the special features these included two buttons on the back of the micromouse to make it easier to switch between different modes. As well as a OLED display that shows its current mode both of these were easy to code and wire so they did’t take up to much time we then started the comabt task which also went smoothly as we had already set up all the LDR it was just a matter of coding correctly. We attemted to code ultasonic sensors for the tracking part of the combat but we had limited time so we scraped it and used the IR sensors instead we also made much smaller tweaks and changes before we sent it to Gregynog. 

April Blog

This was the final month for the project and we only had limited time so we tried to perfect all the tasks jumping from each mode constanly and making minor final ajustments to make sure everything worked and was ready for examination. We made our group presentation at gregynog and presented that as well. the only major modification we did was on combat where we did one final change to the code before the combat final which help us massively as it helped us reach the semi final but other than that the project was complete.