Research Journals

Friday: August 13, 2010: Emily Schultheis

AstroBot is currently experiencing thermal difficulties. Right now I'm having trouble getting the machine to stay on longer than about 2 minutes...at no point during that time does the monitor show usable progress of starting up. Only once, I got the message that the CPU had to shut down prematurely due to thermal overload. I vaguely remember the rest of the team experiencing this same trouble before, but somehow it was fixed. At the time I was new and didn't quite understand everything going on. I don't remember if this was the exact same error they got or how they managed to fix it. Two other minor details that may or may not be relavent: the charging indicators (red and yellow LEDs) are not lighting up when AstroBot is plugged in to the charging station. For the time being, I am leaving the machine undocked to prevent any potential overloads, however unlikely. Also, when I first checked the status of the machine this morning, I found that the power switch was on, though the bumblebee stereovision had turned off (this tends to go off automatically). I was able to boot up AstroBot only once this morning, but it seemed to shut off when I was not paying specific attention to it. ---> Simple troubleshooting error to be fixed. I saw the spark jump between the charging apparatus and the docking station, but on further investigation the dock was actually not plugged. I don't know how that worked. Anyway, AstroBot is now charging correctly according to the appropriate indicators.

Recently, Stephen worked on fixing the IR sensors, because the original code was not working. Our current goal for AstroBot is to fit the shell over the body of the machine itself, but to do this, several adjustements must be made to the design - particularly in how certain sensors are placed. These adjustments in sensor location thus require anewed calibration of those sensors and modification of their driving code. The two infared sensors are now velcroed in place on the external of AstroBot's shell as they should be. Anyway, most recently, Stephen added several couts for diagnostic purposes, replaced IR #1.22 with #1.9, and changed IR coding (because the original was not working; from his observation, this was because the original coding was incomplete..functional for previous uses, but not everything). We hope to test the IR sensors further later today, though from last usages, everything seemed to be working fine. Stereovision still needs attention.