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.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
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.
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.
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