These past few weeks have been very eventful. Since the last status report, the motors weren’t turning even though we couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Since then, we figured out that the delay time was incorrect, so now the motors spin and we tested it out with Shane’s strainer contraption and it did move up and down. I also tested out the limit switch, and have the code set up to do that. As a team, we got the control tower prototype set up and we recorded hot pot using our control tower. I personally thought a lot about how we are going to connect everything together, since we are sending signals from both Arduinos to the Jetson Nano and back. I experimented with code on how we can communicate between, and I found that using the Serial monitor allows me to easily communicate between them. I also made a signals FST that demonstrates when signals change and when signals need to communicate between hardware (see below for the picture). Using this FST, I coded up a version for the final code for the Arduino’s using the code I had already written, except now I made it work for 3. This code is still untested, but it at least gives me a starting point to adjust once we start testing.
I do feel like that as a team we are a little behind, which has caused me to be a little behind as I hoped to be further along in the integration. Without having things set up to test, it is hard to see if my code would work. To catch up, I think we need to meet more frequently and really grind out making everything come together and do some testing.
In the next week, I hope to be able to test out my code in some capacity (at least the Arduino’s individually and fake the communication between the Nano using the Serial monitor). I also hope to check to see if the timing turns out ok, and see if I need to include any interrupts to make the timing smoother.