Class #4

A sigh of relief!

     At the beginning of this class I won't lie that I was feeling quite overwhelmed. Mike and I had let ourselves fall behind in our progress of the activities, which is a situation which we do not often find ourselves. To add insult to injury, Mike had let me know that he was not able to make it to class today which meant that I had to take charge of everything and try and get us up to speed! I began with the RFID components, where a new phidget controller was implemented as well as new input devices, it was quite interesting how the RFID signals were able to travel and provide a textual display, however it was even better when Wild E. Cyotee showed up to offer a little confidence booster!

     Next I moved onto the DC motor control, where I first used a lamp to test the variable controls of brightness, which when swapped out for a Servo motor, translated over to motor speed and direction control using the horizontal scroll bar. As a progression of this motor control, I hooked up two motors and constructed the bot using the kit provided, and implemented a joystick control on the interface and was introduced to the first piece of 'robotics' that I have yet built (pretty exciting). The bot was able to drive forward, backward and turn left and right, by altering negative and positive values in the coding the joystick was properly calibrated.

     Next I moved on to servo motor controlling, the first activity was to identify which motor in the picture was not a true servo motor, which I deemed to be the one in the clear housing, since there was a lack of a potentiometer which is a key element of the function of a servo motor. The potentiometer allows the motor to determine which position it starts in and depending on the inputs, where and how far it has to move.

     The final activities worked with some different sensors which worked with the new 888 phidget controller which we were issued today, these included a temperature sensor which was quite neat because of its accuracy, by simply wrapping my hand around the sensor I was able to see a rise in the temperature and then after blowing cold air on it, the temperature again immediately dropped. The last was the potentiometer, which basically tracked motion in a rotational manner. By implementing a y=mx+b equation we were able to calibrate the device to work on a cm basis and were therefore use it as a tool of measurement which was quite interesting.
By the end of the class I was able to breath a sigh of relief, because even though I had not completely caught up, I was able to make up a lot of time and get us within reach. I am looking forward to next class when I hope we will be able to continue with this pace and get back on track before our next test.
See you on Tuesday!