We spent much of the day getting the hardware fixed and then starting this afternoon worked to reach closer to checkoff. Luis spent the early part of the day getting the Finding enemy FSMs working, but for unknown reasons the motors were only run for a couple minutes after plugging in a fully charged battery. We spent the whole morning figuring out why, but by noon Edmond was the only one around. He and Luis worked with Max the TA to determine the cause of the problem. We initally thought it could have to do with our daisy chained regulators or a current spike somewhere in our electrical system. We found out on the internets that daisy chained regulators are common, and even Max encouraged it. We let the Uno and our tape and bump sensor perfboard run from the battery for many minutes, and then when running the motors, the "Going to sleep" message came up in seconds. Replacing the battery does nothing to remedy this.

The tape sensor ribbon has finally taken its toll, because Edmond broke the casing when he tried to remove it to access the power distribution board, and took 45 minutes to replace it! When he did, Max gave him another power distribution board to try out. After inserting it to the rest of the Uno stack, the battery A/D voltage value increased from 270 (from which the program no longer works) to 300 for the same fully charged battery. In the past 24 hours we went through two broken power boards to fix our electronics!

The next thing Edmond did is to make sure the tape and track wire sensors were working. He modified the tape sensor hysteresis values, and experimented with the now working track wire sensors and found that there are two different voltages that represent a high and low value, 1.65 and 3.03V for both sensors. A/D conversion had to be used instead of just a digial pin, but at that point he got it the software module working.

Jake and Luis came by at this point to look over Edmond's work. While the software module is working, we found out when we mounted them both at the bottom side of the sensor base the horizonital plane of the inductors need to be perpendiular with the track wire underneath the MDF board to register detection of the wire. This means the front part of the inductor that says 103 needs to be facing straight up to allow maximum range of detecting the track wire without contact. In addition, placing the two sensors somehow interfered with the tape sensors. It turns out the hysteresis values Edmond originally had were no longer good for the tape sensors due to movement of the sensors and noise from other sensors or electrical sources so they need to be updated again. Jake also trimmed the back end of the bumper so that it wouldn't touch the wheels when in motion, but Luis thinks the new bumper requires the code to be updated for the FSM to work again. Jake also experimented with a servo controller and cut a piece of the funnel to fit a servo with a foamcore piece that served as the bottleneck for the balls. We experiemented with the mechanism to find that if we can cover the edges of the funnel we can force the balls to be on top of the servo mechanism to feed them down to the launcher.

We are getting closer and closer to min-spec checkoff, we just need to make sure our sensors are fine and then we can work on the Finding enemy and portal FSMs, and integrate our launcher. Hopefully we finish by Friday!