Some Progress

This week, much was completed.  One realization after my last post was the success of the current design.  While seriously lacking in quality, the design for the hamster ball is solid.  Serious tweaky will be needed in the future, but for now it will work.

For the time being, the servo is scrapped and only the drive system will be looked at.  News of a CNC lathe and mill soon to be added to our senior design lab prompted me to draw up the plans for this system in CATIA and convert to NC programming to execute on the lathe and mill.  This will hopefully fix a lot of the tweaking that will be needed and make the design more solid.  The files can be found here.

Much was accomplished on the programming side as well.  Earlier in the week, I successfully managed to control an LED on an Arduino using Processing and key duration.  The Arduino code and Processing code are written based on the duration of any key being pressed.  When a key is on the keyboard, the LED on the Arduino will slowly start to light up to the maximum value (bright).  When that key is released, the LED will turn off (or nearly off for this example).  It was discovered during the exploration of this code, that the Arduino was reading all incoming bytes of information as ASCII characters as similar with the XBee modules.  A similar implementation of the atoi() command was needed to convert the ASCII characters to integer values.  For further details, see this post.

This code was then modified to set a foundation for the Arduino software on the ball and the Processing code which will be within the web page.  The files can be found here and here.  They are not complete, nor have been tested, however, they show a start of some progress.

On another front, the electronics are being slowly condensed within one board.  Our instructor has helped with eliminating much of the unneeded hardware from the Arduino schematic and I have added the motor driver chip to the file.  A preview can be seen below.  The completed schematic will be uploaded when available.

Schematic of Arduino circuitry and motor drive unit

Still to be added to the schematic is the XBee setup and headers.  This will complete the schematic and hopefully allow us to begin arranging the PCB.