Omkar’s Status Report for 12/10

This week, we focused on making our pickup and dropoff as robust as possible. Saral and I worked on modifying the electromagnet PCB to try to discharge the inductor faster by adding a resistor in parallel with the inductor. That did not seem to work very well, but we added some electrical tape between the pallets and the electromagnet, which worked well for disrupting the magnetic field a little bit so that the pallet does not stay magnetized to the electromagnet but not so much that the electromagnet cannot pick up the pallet. I also modified the code for sending the command to enable and disable the electromagnet to the robots, so they activate the electromagnet earlier, and the system is more fault tolerant to dropped packets on the network. We also added a capacitor on the 5V rail to prevent the MCU from restarting when the electromagnet gets enabled, allowing us to extend our battery life. I helped Prithu debug and implement the new task planner, which uses the distance from pallets to robots as a heuristic. Finally, we filmed videos for our demo on Monday in case we have issues in Techspark.