Testing, testing!
02 Nov 2015This week has finally seen some visible progress. Our friends at Leeds Hackspace cut the chassis parts for us and I am pleased to say that the whole thing went together without any major modifications. Of course, the holes I’ve forgotten to put on the drawing and the difficulties in construction sequence have come straight to light and there has been much scribbling on a print of the parts for modifications for the final competition chassis.
The Pi, radio receiver, batteries and circuit board have been temporarily fitted into the chassis. When we tried to test the radio control nothing happened… A few more continuity checks on the motor controller stripboard found my dodgy soldering which was easily fixed and off we went! Control is good with proportional speed control and varying turn speeds easily mastered on the joystick. Of course, the driver needs to develop his skills too…
On with the sensors… Having tested the ultrasonic sensor last week, Harry plugged everything in and got odd readings and then nothing. He went back to previous versions of his code, changed the GPIO pins he was using and spent loads of time trying to get things working. Dad to the rescue! KEITH came out of his box and his ultrasonic sensor was plugged into KEITH Evo. That worked perfectly, so KEITH was partially dismantled and he donated his sensor. Minutes later and we had KEITH Evo autonomously approaching the wall and stopping. The code needs some fine tuning to set motor speed relative to distance so that control is more accurate but we’re on the way.
Harry is on with testing the rest of the sensors whilst I work on the details of the chassis and the blinky bits. Having had some doubts that we were going to get there with KEITH Evo, I think we are now feeling a little more confident. :-)
~Andy
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