Open Day

Well Open Day is done!!!

All in all it was quite successful too. The car ran all day, the software didn't crash once. The only technical issue that was starting to bother us was that the big SLA batteries weren't charging as fast as we had hoped.
Now I say technical, as we did have one other issue on the day which we didn't really expect. Some lady from the marketing department (calling herself the "event coordinator") didn't like poor little Rev too much. She kept insisting that he stay in one part of the room which had bad wireless reception and was out of the majority of peoples field of vision. It was also quite hard to keep it in that area when we had members of the public controlling a car with a video feed full of static and no pre-knowledge of the room. Needless to say she was on our case all day.
Anyway project was very successful, hopefully Graham will link to some more photos that he has taken on the day and before hand. But other than that I think that pretty much concludes this Blog and the project (only a report left to write).

Cheers
REV team.
Graham, Jason, Peter, Philip

Photos from week 3

Just a quick post to link to some photos taken during week 3 of the semester.

Check them out here:
http://www.peterkh.net/photos/rev-week3/

Week 5

We have had an interesting week 4, firstly we have found out about a new requirement for our project. It seems in our subject convener has decided that it'd be fun if everyone from every group posts to our subject discussion board each week with what they have done. So basically a blog but with more repetitions and crappier interface. We are debating whether we should all just write one line a week and then link to this blog. I will also note that our main objection with this is not so much the requirement (although personally I'm not thrilled with it and don't think I'm alone in that opinion) it is that we found out about it by pure chance as it was never communicated to us via the convener except on a single document hidden away in the depths of the subjects website!

Anyway politics aside for a moment, we have fixed our car. It took till last night to work out a solution. What happened is that when we removed the shell of the car (to attach SLAs) we had to disconnect the two headline globes. We didn't think much of this as they were very small and didn't look intergal to the system. But over the last week we have blown three transistors, two with SLAs and one with the original battery! So now our car has two rather bright globes attached to the rear of it (to keep as far away from the camera as possible)

Last night we also had the software and camera in a somewhat working condition and we were able to drive the car around the lab using the original controller but by watching the video feed from the car, good times!

Open day is now only 6 days away but we are now back on track after a week of "how the hell are we going to fix this car" which is a good feeling. Today / tomorrows goal is to get the controller working with the software.

Getting there....

The project is in the middle of an intense couple of days.
Yesterday we worked on the mechanical aspects of the car (how to mount the SLA's and the video camera). We also rectified the video receiver problems by buying a new one at Jaycar. Graham also begun to solder up the final version of the parallel port interface. And to conclude the day we had pizza and broke the car.
Today we tracked down the problem with the car - it took all day but we narrowed it down to the MOSFET transistor tied to the really large heat sink. Graham continued with the parallel port interface and Jason took the day off. We also visited Dragi about the open day, and discovered to our dismay that we have forgotten to implement sound on the car for open day.
Tomorrow we will get a new MOSFET and see if it works. We probably will need to have a think about how to do sound... personally I think a small transistor radio and cheep FM transmitter might do the job ;)

Start of week 3

We are now at the start of week 3 already! crazy, crazy times....

Anyway

• The battery issue seems to have somewhat been solved, SLAs all the way. The car runs fine of 6v instead of 7.2 and the extra weight didn't seem to be an issue either. We have put in an order for several of these for open day, lets just hope they arrive in time!
• Phil has done a truly sterling job on the video and I believe we can now send stills across the network so good times there
• As for openday, things are looking OK. Although we still have a fair amount of work left, the camera has not been tested properly (due to a stuff up with the receiver arriving) and the new car has not been interfaced with the computer as yet. 20 days left...
• Software is looking good, client interface still needs more work but the server and network side are looking pretty good.

Overall project status: Critical stage but on track so far