Week 1

At the beginning of lab in week 1, the students were exposed with the hardware components needed for the lab. To write the program for the Arduino, students were required to download the sketchbook where the structure of the program was developed for AEV project. After setting up the required components as shown in Figure 1, the group worked on basic programming to control the Arduino and familiarize themselves with the series of functions calls. Using the basic functions; celerate(), motorSpeed(), goFor(), brake() and reverse(), the group were able to accelerate, decelerate, reverse, and stop the propellers. As the Arduino is connected to the motor of the propeller, the program sent to the Arduino will control the movement of the motor according to the program.  

The series of functions calls was typed by in the sketchbook and uploaded to the the Arduino. Uploading the program to the Arduino was a bit difficult for the scenario 1 as the the propeller could not work. After revising it many times, the problem was resolved. The group completed both scenarios in the lab and the movement of the propellers was observed and recorded. The group members used the extra free time to discuss the proper planning of creating the AEV so everything could be done at the right time

For the first scenario, it was noted that the propeller started to rotate with a slow speed for a few seconds at the beginning. Then, all of the propellers rotated and stopped according to the program written in the sketchbook. The speed of the propeller could not be identified whether it changed or stayed the same. During the first scenario, the propeller rotated, reversed and stopped without any obstruction. However, at the beginning of the completion of scenario 1, it was observed that there was a problem with uploading the program to the Arduino. For the first try, the uploading process failed as none of the propellers moved and the uploading process had to be done again. It was found that the motor in scenario 2 should produce a sound of Star Wars opening song. However, scenario 2 could only be done halfway as all of the propellers moved as it was written in the program but the motor did not produce the sound of Star Wars song or could not be identified by the group members..

The potential errors that could have been found in this lab were in the process of uploading the program to the Arduino. The instructions on how to connect the Arduino to the sketchbook and motor was confusing to the group members led to dysfunctionality of the propellers for the first try. The error was resolved by resetting the AEV controller. Another error that could have been found was the coding of the program itself. At first, some of the commands in the program was not followed by the propeller and, it was solved by debugging the program.

Based on the observations of the propellers, the commands used in this project worked perfectly fine as the  propellers were able to accelerate, decelerate, reverse and brake smoothly. By applying the brake(), it made the motor to stop right away. The team did not meet during this week.