MrRSM

Well, this upcoming weekend is the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Challenge (IGVC). As of a few weeks ago I was only on one team. Our robots name is Culture Shock and we are competing in the design competition as we did not have enough time to complete all of the other programming aspects necessary to compete in the other two parts of the competition. While working with this team I learned a lot about java programming. I was working with a stereo camera and doing vision processing. I honestly did not know all that much about it but over the time I kept working with it and kept understanding more and more. In the end I came out with knowledge of many aspects of Java that I would not have been exposed to for quite a while in my in school training. Continuing on, about a month or maybe a little less I was asked if I could change out the remote e-stop on the other robot team viper II. The problem it was having was the requirements for the competition stated that the remote e-stop must work at least from a distance of 50 ft. The current one would not always work as well as only work from a distance of 50 ft. Now for me being a computer science major and not having a minor or any real training in anything EE related only had my knowledge of building the L2Bot as well as taking apart a ton of electronics stuff to see how they worked to go on. The creator of most of the electrical of the robot walked me through taking it apart and showed me where the old e-stop was and how it was connected. From there it was all me… not exactly what I wanted. I couldn’t afford to mess anything up as the competition is only a week away and they wanted to test two days after we just took the entire robot apart. The new e-stop did not fit all that great in the original box where the old one was. I ended up having to drill new holes to mount it properly. The next hurdle that I had to overcome was the fact that the power wires to the new e-stop were HUGE and their were two of them. The old one had a single 12 or 14 gauge wire. So the one power slot on the pcb was not made for this new e-stop. I found some connectors and used some smaller wire from the excess wires I cut off the other cables to take the two large wires and make it cut down to one smaller wire. In the end everything inside the box went back together without a hitch other then their are now 4 open holes in the bottom of the case (I didnt measure right the first time I drilled the new holes I didnt measure the proper distance because I forgot about the extra distance that the connectors for the cables add to the base unit. WOOPS!) At this point it was already around 11pm and their was nobody around to help me put the robot back together which was a two person job. I ended up getting everything I could without putting on the body or the mast which contained most of the sensors. Not wanting to come back in early to finish it the next day I called my friend and had him come help me finish the assembly. We got the cover back on, attached the mast and hooked up the sensors. I turned on the robots power and then finally tested the new system (probably should have done this without everything put back together just in case) everything worked as far as I could tell. I did a test run and it worked well over 50 feet. The next day I did not get a phone call or email saying anything was broken or not working so I assumed the best. Till that night when I got an email and a call saying that the digital compass was not working and the power inverter was making a high pitch sound. I had to come in on Saturday now to try and fix a problem I don’t know how I made and a power inverter issue. The inverter issue got fixed a little later Friday night and the noise was due to the fact the computer was pulling 200 amps, which was the max amps of the inverter, then they had a usb hub and something else plugged into the inverter. Once the computer was not plugged in there everything was fine. On to Saturday. I was asked to come in before noon because that was when the software people were supposed to be testing everything and they wanted the digital compass working by then. I agreed, but then realised if I come in early how will I know if the compass is working or not? I decided to come in at noon. I got there and took a quick look at the robot and everything was connected and the power was on so I was clueless. I walked into the office and the project leader told me that it was the software people who had bad code as he tested it with his code and everything worked just fine. That was a huge relief to me as I tried to do everything right as to not screw everything up and I did. That was quite an accomplishment for me as it is an important robot to all of the people working on it and I come in with little to no experience and replace a component that could possibly put the robot out of commission. I am just glad all of that went off without a hitch. Now I am excited about the upcoming weekend as we have the competition and hope to take 1st place in the design competition with Culture Shock and hopefully Viper II will place highly in all of the other competitions as well as design.