PmWiki | Student / Laundry Bot Process

BACK

The first thing I did for this project is plan out the robotic arm. This took about a week, as my plan morphed and evolved as I worked on building it. The building itself took about a week and a half. I often built something and then moved on to the next step, just to find myself having to redesign and rebuild later on. I still am making small changes almost every day, but I have confidence that my design is a good one.

My next step was to create the code for the robot. I first focused on operating the servo motors. I created functions within my main function to control the movement of the arm (ie int clawopen, int arm_up, etc). It took a while to create these, because I had to first understand how to operate the servo motors. Each function had its own small problem that needed to be addressed. However, I am really glad that I took this step, because it was really helpful later on when I had to start adding the servo functions to the main code.

I then tested my sensor data. I had to come up with good ranges both for sensing the sock on the floor and telling whether it is black or white. Once I had some good information, I was able to start writing my main code! This didn't prove to be too difficult, because of all the previous work I had put in. However, I did need to do some serious debugging. Many times my recalled functions interacted in ways that I hadn't planned. I did much of the debugging using different types of beeps to let me know when I had entered and left my loops. I also changed the lights many times, so that I could know what was going on.