Preliminary R&D

Team Q is still working on brainstorming ideas to improve upon the sample AEV design. The team will use the following methods to accomplish this goal [1].

1.Become familiar with techniques for design decision making.
2.Become familiar with a structured method to screen and score design concepts.
3.Perform concept screening and scoring methods with AEV design concepts using the sample AEV as a baseline reference.
The image below shows the sample AEV design that our team is starting off with and will be making improvements to throughout the semester.

In developing the code, the team created a working program for each individual exercise. As each one had different requirements, all code differed from each other. However, they all shared the same commands. Some of these include:

Celerate: Accelerates and decelerates either motor

Motorspeed: Initializes speed of the motor(s)

goFor: Runs motors for specified amount of time at certain amount of power

Brake: Cuts power to specified motor(s)

Reverse: Reverses polarity of specified motor(s)

After coding the Arduino multiple times, we found that optimizations were able to be made, such as removing redundant brake commands. We also found that we had to reverse the polarity in the beginning of our code in order to get the motors rotating in the correct direction. These changes are evident in the code provided below.

 

Exercise 1:

The code above was to familiarize ourselves with the functions of the Arduino and how to code in the future. It includes basic function calls such as celerate, brake, goFor, reverse and motorSpeed.

Exercise 2:

Exercise 2 served the purpose of testing out the function goToAbsolutePosition(), which helped us gauge how to use it in order to accurately move our AEV a certain amount of distance.

 

Exercise 3:

The code for Exercise 3 above was used to actually get our AEV tested on the track. While not evident from this one screen capture, the team had to adjust the power level of the motors in order to get the AEV moving, as too little was seen to not move it at all.