This week, I wrote the firmware for all of the different peripherals of the robots (Screen, LEDs, Servos, and Electromagnet). I also started the communication firmware that allows a computer to send POST requests to the robot. I brought up one robot in its entirety. The other robots are working, but some of the neopixel LEDs are not soldered properly, so only a few of the LEDs turn on for the other robots. I also worked on our design presentation slides, which I will present in the coming week. Our project is on schedule – we are planning on meeting tomorrow to determine the camera mounting and interface the robot firmware with the computer vision to have a better way of controlling the robots since we found out that the servos have a hard time driving straight – either because the servos are not exactly the same or because the PWM on the ESP8266 is driven by software interrupts. By next week, I aim to have a more robust communication framework in place and start on the controls software to get the robots to follow a straight line and hopefully a more complicated path.
Team Status Report for 9/24
In the near future, we envision the electromagnet not initially working and the camera lens being distorted at the edges being our most significant risks. We are planning on mitigating these risks by spending more time debugging the firmware and hardware on the MCU, the robot PCB, and the electromagnet and trying to understand why our electromagnet could not attract a paperclip. We found resources from manufacturers, namely Seeed and Keyestudio, about how to use their products with an Arduino, so we are confident that it should work soon. For the camera, we are going to have to calibrate the camera by moving a robot (with lit neopixel LEDs) in relation to a fixed camera and determining how the lengths between the centers of the LEDs change based on where the robot is. From there, we will have an idea of how the camera lens is curved at the edges compared to the center of view.
We are moving the robot field construction to the coming week, but everything else on the schedule should stay the same. As of now, we do not have any changes to the design or requirements, but we are reviewing and discussing the feedback that we got from the proposal presentation.
We got PCBs back this week and did an initial fit test: 
Then, we reflowed and assembled three robots:
We also got the screen working:
Omkar’s Status Report 09/24
I helped assemble the robots since the PCBs arrived in the middle of this week. Three robots were reflowed, and I started writing initial code to test that each of the individual components on the robots was working. I wrote code to test the servos, the neopixel LEDs, and the screen. I am still in the middle of debugging why we can’t turn on the electromagnet. Some of the robots are in different stages of bring-up. I think we should create a spreadsheet to track what hardware/firmware is working on which robot. We were unable to finish creating the field, but we discussed the plan for setting that up. Other than that, we seem to be on track for our schedule. We are going to build the field in the coming week. In the next week, I want to finish writing the firmware for all of the robots and ensure that all components are working on all robots.