BlogDay 71:Of Serial, Steering and Software Lab

Hmmm... that's a long delay in posting, i agree. But we weren't idle.

The most important thing from my part is the fact that the serial port communication part is now fully operational. I spend a month on it. Really, one whole month. There were all these example code in the net for serial port communication but it seemed to evade me for all these days. The hyperterminal in windows is communicating with the code programmed in the AVR ( by sri raj and eoeo) alright but whatever code i wrote, it seemed to ignore it.

The code wasn't the only difficulty. The laptop provided to us from the department does not have a serial port. So we bought this small smart device which gave us a serial port on one end and a usb port on the other. The driver for the thing is pretty nasty though. ( Lots of blue screens in windows... )

I was pretty stuck at this point and no important coding was done for all these days. Two days back i stumbled upon the idea of searching the sourceforge again. It had given us opencv a few months back. I simply did it and voila! got a bunch of serial port libraries. These were much different from the commercial ones i had been trying... no nag screens, no complex stuff...

It was just like love at first sight! ;) The very first run of the code told me that this would work.
The UI was pretty professional and i was able to send even sentences to the port and read back.
So the next day was spend on integrating the serial port thing into our code. It wasn't easy at first. The code was a good one with MFC and stuff and miranda was a small (?) console application. Then i did the most obvious thing.

Now the serial port code contains miranda. Yes. I put miranda into it rather than putting it into miranda.

Miranda V 0.3 has got a gui now a got a serial communication part and two threads communicating with each other. Professional enough.

Now to the mech side of it.

The 'thing' we ( 'we'...? well i'm just a spectator in the hardware part... read 'we' as eoeo, sri raj, bipin, abhilash, maruthu...) made has got problems with the front wheel and steering.
There isn't enough turning. Either we'll have to fine tune the steering and front wheels or we need a much more powerful motor. Time constraints tell us that ordering a new motor is not feasible. We'll have to find some way of making it work better.

But we have got the rear wheels all fixed. Even a brake. Our AGV is taking shape.

Of software lab? hmmm... its this small thing.. i shifted all my work to the lab again. Working in the room isn't paying off well... At least we got much more computing power there. One month of serial porting here didn't give me anything. I took another session in the lab to make things right. ;)

So almost two weeks to go. I mean, for the evaluation. Will we make it?