Hi, folks!
As the subject might suggest, there's a control systems meeting today at 3 pm (as there will be each Saturday) in MEB 238.
Note that when we scheduled the meeting, we failed to consider the possibility that the Mech. Engineering building (MEB) might very well be locked and unavailable to us; if you get there and the doors are locked, call my cell phone and I'll let you know where we are. (I prefer voice over texts, since I don't have a plan with texting.)
Today's topics include:
- Subsystem team responsibilities: goals, deadlines, and other scary things.
- Competition rules of specific relevance to our subsystem.
- System architecture: an abstract overview of how the robot's control systems work to achieve those goals.
- What components do we need, what does each do, and how is it connected to the rest of the system?
- If your eyes haven't glazed over from boredom yet: since we're building a device that's operated remotely in real-time, we want as little delay in the system as possible. What are the implications of this, and how do we deal with them?
Time permitting:
- Learning: you guys like it, right? Of COURSE you do! ;)
- If you want to help with this year's URC competition, we need to get you programming! Although we technically delegate member education to our Workshops and Education Committee (i.e. Robotics Anonymous), we still don't have workshops set up and I don't like empty promises, especially when they're mine — so if there's any interest I'll tell you about the basic syntax used by the Arduino programming environment and do some examples on the board.
- If I haven't lost you by that point, we might walk through the Pieces of 8 code and/or pair/triple up and play with some of the Arduinos we've got.
I hope to see you there! (It's windy out there — try not to get blown away on your way over, eh? ;)