Thursday, December 12, 2013

Update before presentation

So the time has come for the course to end, and unfortunately we have some hurdles before completing this project. The first is that we were on the tail end of submitting our parts for the laser cutter and 3D printer, so we don't have our parts to build the car yet. Although this is a setback, we still haven't seen success in the RF code we've been working on. We've received some help from the community on the Arduino forum, which is slowly helping us along, but its also adding complexity to our code which isn't making this come together any faster. Below are images of what our individual parts should look like, and this blog will continue to be updated until the car is completed. Until next time...

Car Base
Main Drive Gear
Steering Arm
Steering Rack Gear
Steering Rack
Super Awesome Wheel

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Oh the code..........

Since we are waiting on parts from the 3D printer, its time to finally get the code in order. We made some strides today with a new library utilizing the RF transmitter along with some help from Professor Sullivan, but there are still some serious issues. The code below takes the L/R and U/D joystick inputs and mashes them together using one number (xPos*10000+yPos). The problem here is that when xPos goes to 0, we are left with a string just containing the yPos. We would like to find a way to use 0's as place holders for the unused x values, but we still have to figure out how to split the number into two variables on the receiving end.
This is what the receiving data looks like:

Received 5070504 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 5070504 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 504 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 504 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 504 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 504 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 10537 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 10537 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 10537 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 10537 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 5070976 / 24bit Protocol: 1
Received 5070976 / 24bit Protocol: 1

Until next time......