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Collab Log #006: Brenda and Beck continue soldering

Collab Log #006: Brenda and Beck continue soldering

Here’s part 2 of the beta brain kit progress! Tonight Beck and Brenda were soldering many of the headers needed for this board, taking approximately 3 hours. Watch the video snippet update here

Some of the bugs found this week were:

  • Overview:
    Might want to mention about having a micro USB cable that can do sync
  • Part 5, Step 16 – Rephrase 4x 5 pins, so they can all be cut at once. Had to sand F headers to fit
  • Part 5, Step 25 – Two right-most holes for the current sensor
  • Part 5, Step 26 – ‘All available pads’, not quite

They are making great progress and finding useful bugs to improve on in the instructions. I think that next week they will be pretty close to getting set with installing the Teensy and Arduino software to program the board with its first blink! Want to see part 1 of the progress? Check it out here

Collab Log #005: Eng. design benchmarking

Collab Log #005: Eng. design benchmarking

We met with some of the Master’s engineering design group again. Tonight, they performed benchmark analysis on Bowie the robot. We also discussed in depth the tradeoff predicament version 1.0 of the robot is at with regards to the power of the motors. It was great that they were attentive and understood. We watched some of the videos of the testing of the robot in Summer 2018 to analyse some of the timing of the turns and going forward. At the end, we went through the photos of all 23 iterations of the robot. This was the last piece of project management work – next week is design time!

Kit Log #045: Programming instructions outline

Kit Log #045: Programming instructions outline

In between progress on the collaborations on Wednesday night (Wednesday night = Robot Missions meets), we were outlining the programming instructions. We also made a very simple sketch to test the assembly of the Bowie Brain Kit, without the need of all the libraries. So far, here are what the software instruction outline looks like:

  • Software Instructions
  • 1. Install Arduino IDE
    https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
  • 2. Install Teensyduino
    https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_download.html
  • 3. Download BowieLib
    https://github.com/RobotMissions/BowieLib
  • 4. Install BowieLib
    Move BowieLib folder to your Arduino libraries folder. Eg, on Mac it is: ~/Documents/Arduino/libraries
  • 5. Open Arduino IDE
  • 6. Open BowieBrainBlink in Arduino
    File > Examples > BowieLib > BowieBrainBlink
    https://github.com/RobotMissions/BowieLib/blob/master/examples/BowieBrainBlink/BowieBrainBlink.ino
  • 7. Change the board to Teensy 3.6
    Tools > Board > Teensy 3.6
  • Here are the other settings, they should be fine by default, but it’s good to double check.
  • 8. Plug in micro usb cable to the Teensy 3.6 on the Bowie Brain board and your computer. Note that this must be a ‘sync’ cable (because it needs to send data back and forth). If it’s just a ‘charge’ cable, it won’t work.
  • 9. Press verify on the code
  • 10. Press upload on the code
  • 11. Verify that the LEDs are blinking!
    It should be the big green LED on the Brain Board and the little LED on the Teensy 3.6. They will be on for 1 second, then off for 1 second.
  • 12. If something is not working, please send us an email

We will have to go through it again and verify that no steps are missing. Often times this step can be the most frustrating one when things are missing or not explained properly. After this, we will need to make instructions for it – mainly making the images. The process will be pretty similar to the electronics instructions on google sheets.

Oh yeah, just placing this image here for the board settings, in case it gets forgotten…

Hopefully we will complete this before Wednesday, because have a hunch that Beck and Brenda might be able to reach this far after the last of the soldering! That’s exciting