This week we ended off the semester with our System Level Design Review Presentation where we explained our ideas throughout the project, and the current plans to come. We thank you all so much for the experience and knowledge we have gained during this project and we hope to continue the same motivation in the upcoming semester!
Blog Posts
Prototype Week!
This week the team focused on presenting the Preliminary Design Review presentation to expert judges and fellow classmates. The team was able to give a demonstration of our working prototype design. As of now, the wires are wrapped around the chassis and board pins until the PCB prototype is complete. The team believes once this is in place, the software design component will fall into place. We look forward to our future progress as we come closer to the end of the current semester.
For now, please enjoy our dancing robot!
PDR Week!
We finished the Preliminary Design Review Report and finished and presented the Preliminary Design Review Presentation to our sponsor and IPPD class. We designed a prototype layout for our PCB and printed it out to demonstrate where the pin mappings would line up with the chassis and the DSP board. We plan to make a chart documenting the pinouts between the DSP and the robot chassis and their compatibilities and review module 15 from the RSLK curriculum that covers audio signals!
Presentation Week!
This week we are finishing up the report and delivering our IPPD Product Design and Specifications presentation. While we met with our coach this week, we came up with new strategies for implementing the target board to our robot chassis board. One idea was to place the PCB adapter board atop the MSP432 and then connect the DSP Launchpad to the adapter board’s top male header pins. In this configuration, we plan to use GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins to pass the DSP signal through the MSP432 to connect to the RSLK-MAX chassis board. This configuration is subject to change, but we believe we have a good understanding of the project and starting point in the directions we want to take regarding the hardware component.
Report Week!
This week we submitted our first draft on the product design specifications which included the customer’s needs and technical descriptions of the project. We are also researching products that have a similar purpose as our project in order to get a better idea of which technical specs relate to our product. All this information will help us better with concept generation in hopes of solidifying the prototype’s design and expectations. This week, we also created a roadmap (schedule) for our current tasks and future plans. The roadmap will help us have a visual representation of our progress and will alert us in case we are behind.
What’s new
This week we started assembling the robot and working on the software applications. We first started with the labs provided by the Texas Instruments TI-RSLK MAX curriculum. We started by getting familiar with CCS and the robot itself through the core labs such as Lab6(GPIO) and Lab 12 (Motors). This research led us to create a project that uses the front bumper sensors, LEDs, and motors to find its way around obstacles or even navigate a closed room. We affectionately call it the “wall banger” 🙂
This coming week we will be looking into sourcing extra sensors and booster packs for the MSP432 Board and diving deeper into the labs concerning more advanced topics such as UART and SPI.