After spending a lot of time trying to get my LCD working more than marginally well, and after testing it in a known working system, I have concluded that it is damaged. The LCD displays data on a small portion of the screen, and on that portion I have gotten data from the sonar to be displayed.
The body of my robot has been cut out on the T-Tech machine. My motors and motor mounts will arrive tomorrow, and I will mount them this weekend. I have requested an accelerometer and a gyroscope from TI, which should arrive soon. I also have ordered my wheels.
After several failed attempts, I have gotten my LCD working. I have a basic 3d model in Solidworks for my robot, but I don't have dimensions for all of my parts, so it is still incomplete. Today I will construct proper wires with the wire supplies that came in, as well as pushing the sonar data to the LCD. I am almost ready to cut out my board, and I just need a little guidance during lab today in that regard.
I have received two SRF-05 sonar sensors and my LCD. I have soldered headers to all of them, and verified that they all turn on. I have successfully interfaced my SRF-05s and today during lab I will be getting my LCD working.
I have contacted Ashutosh Saxena about his depth approximation algorithm, and I have been skimming his code. I have also begun reading about Kalman filtering.
I requested a gyrochip and accelerometer sample from Analog devices, but unfortunately they don't supply samples of those chips. I will be buying them in the next few days, along with several sonar sensors, three bump sensors, omniwheels, motors, speed controllers, and possibly the camera.
I have gotten my JTAG programmer to work successfully with my laptop and can now program my board outside of the lab.
I finished my first formal proposal for my robot.
This week I finalized my design for my robot. I searched the internet for prices on the various sensors that I will need and researched several gyrochips and accelerometers. I went to lab and verified that my board works by downloading the test program to it. I also installed WinAVR and Atmel AVR Tools. I have not gotten my programming cable to work with my laptop yet.
I have set up my CISE account and will start posting my weekly reports and various news items about the development of my robot. It can be found at http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~sbuss/.
I prepared my informal report for my robot and have picked a name for it, Crab (Catch and Return Autonomous Bot). I will start modeling it in solidworks this weekend.
I have ordered the board and programmer and chosen a design for my robot. It will use omni-directional wheels to drive in any direction without turning. It will use a gyroscope to track rotation, accelerometers to function as an inertial navigation system, sonar to avoid objects, and a camera to track objects. My goal is to get the robot to intercept a ball rolled at it and return it, while avoiding obstacles.