Week of Mar 16 – Mar 23

Administrivia

None.

Project

This week I worked on a few different things to help get the project ready for our midpoint demo in two weeks:

1. RFID: Found a good library that wrote the driver for the RFID scanner that we purchased. Was able to get the rpi 3 B+ to interface with the scanner via an SPI protocol. I got detection and identification of the NFC stickers to work pretty well, however, it is a bit slow. So I might have to take a look at the libraries driver to see if there is any place to optimize this reading. Additionally, we may have to switch to I2C as it uses less GPIO pins than SPI. These issues will be dealt with after the midpoint demo as we feel that the RFID module is not essential for the demo.
2. Frame and assembly: I was able to laser cut and assemble the interior of the first two cars. We have decided to only have 4 IR  receivers on the side of the car (instead of 8) to reduce the circuit complexities. I found that I made a few mistakes that I will before we make the third car:
   1. The motor housing slots were about an 1/8″ too tight, so I need to increase the spacing of those.
   2. I can narrow down on the width of the battery base and rpi base parts to reduce weight and complexity.
   3. Should remove the outer hexagons of the honeycomb heat sink as they get covered up by the battery base anyway.
3. IR: I built the circuits for the IR transmitter and receivers, and realized that the design we had originally had for the receiver was very wrong. I had to redesign the circuits. As it stands now, the circuit designs are as follows:IR Circuits
4. Xbox Controllers: I also started working on interfacing the Xbox Controllers to a windows PC. I installed visual studio and got the XInput library imported into my C# project. I just need to get a Xbox controller to be able to test and make further progress.

 

Scheduling

I have caught up on my tasks. before I was behind, but I did a lot more this week so I should be on track now.

New Schedule
Dates	Task
Feb 4 – Feb 6	Come up with a first draft of the bill of materials for three cars
Feb 6 – Feb 8	Started design of RFID and IR circuits
Feb 8 – Feb 15	Started design the physical layout of a car
Feb 15 – Feb 22	Finish first draft of circuit designs
Feb 22 – Feb 25	Design the PCB that goes in the car
Feb 25 – Feb 28	Find appropriate battery and power system parts
Feb 28 – Mar 3	Work on preparing for the design review presentation and report
Mar 3 – Mar 9	Finish first draft of 3D model for the car
Mar 17 – Mar 19	Assemble frame.
Mar 19 – Mar 25	Build IR circuits, get started on RFID and Xbox controller and assemble 2 cars.
Mar 25 – Mar 31	Finish the IR circuits so that they are mountable and work on Xbox controller inputs. Also, prepare for midpoint demo.
Mar 31 – Apr 4	Optimize the RFID scanner, make third car.
Apr 4 – Apr 9	Slack

Deliverables for Next Week:

1. Soldered IR circuits to prototype PCBs as well as having the ICs breadboard-ed appropriately.
2. Have Xbox controller interfacing done.
3. Prepare for demo.