Sourav’s Status Report: Week 6

Progress

This past week I was focused on completing tasks relating to having the car fully functionally for movement by the mid-point demo this coming Tuesday.

I completed the encoder reading and feedback loop control for the motors that I had begun last week, and made them more accurate, achieving +- 1 rpm accuracy on a single motor. However, when this was generalized to two threads, some of the accuracy was lost due to the time spent between threads. As such, more time was spent fine-tuning the parameters of the feedback system to get an acceptable level of error. When tested on a straight line test, the car did fairly competently, but further testing could not be completed as the back wheel was not fully attached. Finally the last thing I completed was the set-up of the pi-server thread, which managed the reading of inputs from the laptop. I was able to get this thread started, and receive inputs from the laptop, and then implemented a feature allowing the laptop to turn the car on. This feature is temporary and will soon be replaced by the xbox controller but was more for testing.