Getting up and running for 2010

This is the first time testing out the robot since last year and the first time trying to run our software on windows 7.

I sent in one of our broken servos to be fixed and just mounted and hooked it up again.

I can't get one of the usb to serial adapters to work. I tried a couple of different drivers, but whenever I connected it Windows said it was malfunctioning. Fortunately, my laptop's dock has a serial port which I will use temporarily.

Then I had to uninstall my 64 bit python install and install the 32 bit version because we use psyco and it doesn't support 64 bit. I also spent a while installing all the needed deps.

After connecting some disconnected stuff and tweaking some code, it looks like everything's working again. The fake pid and/or fake pid 2 code is messed up.

Oh, and I got to use my new scope for the first time. It's not so easy to use, but seems to be pretty powerful.

I've done some testing to verify that speed detection breaks at high speeds, did some reading on how to do interrupts on the avr, and am going to order hall effect sensors to try to avoid the delicateness of the current shaft encoder measuring.

Back In Action

Ben and I are on winter break now after our first semesters in grad school, and we're gonna spend some time working on the robot. Ben brings to the table some cool experience with image recognition from his classes. He showed me about 15 lines of matlab which seems to do image recognition at least as good as the old python. We played with that for a while and might switch over to it. We're looking into the performance implications. At first pass, it runs much slower on his laptop than the old code, and we don't have the matlab to c compiler.
We bought a new charger, but it too says that our 12v battery is busted. We'll probably need to replace it and maybe it'll turn out that the old charger was working after all.

Ups and Downs

We started off the day by finding out that the servo saver we bought doesn't fit on our servo.
We got our new and improved sound system set up. We planned on using some speakers Ben had around but they sounded pretty bad. I had some decent speakers in my trunk from an old car. We hooked those up and they were way better. Even though it may not matter for the robot talking, we stuck with them. It makes listening to music while we work nicer. Ben mounted them prettily on the front of the dashboard and I installed the new radio under the hood. It looks and sounds great. We put the wires we need from the radio into an RJ45 connector and connected power and the speakers to an RJ45 jack so we can easily disconnect if we need to take out the radio. As an added bonus, this radio has a 1/8" audio input jack which will make it real easy to connect the laptop.
Our third project for today was to hook up the new 6V battery to the steering servo since our old power supply for the servo didn't work out too well. We wired everything up nicely but when we turned it on to test it, we couldn't control the servo. It turned out we had tied the positive of the 6V battery to the negative of the big one instead of tying the negatives together. And running it like that burned out our servo. We took it apart and found one capacitor burned to a crisp. We're gonna try to find out when it's value is and replace it. And we fixed the wiring :-/.
I tried charging our big 12V battery with the standalone nice charger but didn't realize the crappy charger was connected too. We disconnected it pretty quickly and didn't see anything obviously bad, but now when we connect the external charger to the 12V battery, it lights up weirdly. The manual says those lights mean the battery is messed up, but I wonder if the charger was damaged.
Pictures to come later.