Week 4

By the end of this lab we wanted to have the motor control board fully integrated with the pi, and also have the body of the robot built. However, we ran into an issue at the beginning of the lab that made this impossible. Our 3D print was lost, so we were only able to build the parts of the robot that were laser cut. We were able to progress with the motor control board however, and successfully installed the required software onto the pi. However when we tested it, we found that the motors didn't seem to work. We eventually realised that the motor control board required a second power supply to function. Once we sorted this, we were able to use the motor control board to control the motor gear box and cause it to move in different directions at different speeds. We checked the outputs of the motor control board using the gpi-o test command, and they appeared to be correct, but one of the wheels did not appear to be moving correctly, and would only move sometimes. This appeared to be because the voltage was split unevenly across the two motors, and it wasn't receiving a high enough voltage to function.






Over the next week we will complete the camera code, and by the end of the final lab we hope to have our finished product!