Emma Status Report (3/8/25)

This week I worked on setting up the motors for the boat. I soldered the wires to the motors, set up the circuit with the motor drivers and the Raspberry Pi, and turned the motors on and off using remote terminal commands. I also spent time looking at code examples of how to turn the terminal commands into a continuous loop and how we can integrate the button presses on the application with the motor control. In particular, I found a library function that changes the voltage that the GPIO pins have when they are turned on, which would control the speed of the motor. Next I will be playing with this voltage to see how fast the motors turn with different voltages. Also next week I will be putting together the code for the application and testing the functionality with both the motor circuit and the camera circuit. Once I am done with the code, I will look into the resolution of the images and responsiveness of the system to user inputs. I am currently on schedule and do not see any risks moving forward. 

This week I also worked a lot on the design report. I wrote the introduction, some of the use case requirements, made diagrams for the system implementation and explained how the application will look. I also wrote about design trade offs and how I ended up choosing the processor, camera, motors, and motor drivers.