Coming off of the holiday weekend, we felt pretty good about last week’s success’. We were able to setup our hard-line serial tether on a test board, as well as set it up on a more permanent prototype board. However, a few issues occurred with our permanent version. After we put together the first board, we were running voltage measurements and were getting fairly strange numbers out of our 78L05 voltage regulator. Rather than getting a steady 5v out, we were only achieving around 2.25-2.3. After deciding to scrap that board and move on to a new version, we overcame the voltage issues, but ran into another problem with a faulty MAX232 transceiver chip. Over the weekend we will work to fix that issue in hopes to come back Monday with a completed serial tether.

In the mean time, Owen was able to make significant progress on our IR line-reading array. Our obstacle to work around line reading in the data center is that we do not want obvious lines of electrical tape or like objects running over the large gray tiles. We were able to fabricate up a better solution and we hope to improve on it while working towards our serial tether. Lastly, we also made great progress on setting up our QR code reader using a Pi NOIR camera. In partnership with an IR LED, this camera should be able to pick up QR codes of relatively small sizes, and relay the info to our bot, causing it to go in whichever direction it needs to be going.

Next week we plan on having our serial tether working, and in turn, will be able to get our roomba following lines in an attempt to setup a mock version of our data center path.