Senior Design Team 7
GPS Homing Robot
ECE290 - Spring-Fall 2004

Project Statement

Zachary Chaves (CMPE)
Phillip Johnson (EE)
Gregory Wilkosz (EE)

Week 7

Motor Control Aspect

This week I ordered and received the adapter that Zac requires for his testing.  It is not fully functional as of yet, but will be on Friday.

I found that the drive program will require a simple transistor switch circuit the will allow the signal from the remote control to override the sysem.  This will occur when a signal is sent from the remote control to the vehicle and provide and interrupt to the system.  The transistor will then switch to on and provide the necessary signal to run the vehicle.

The drive program itself is not complete.  I have been able to produce one of the two necessary signals to control the vehicle, but the combination of the two signals is where the current problem exists.  However, I have been able to make many advancements towards the completion which should occur next week.

I have also organized the receipts for all the components that were purchased for the project.  On Friday I will turn them in with a completed reimbursement form to the secretary.  This also states that there should be no further purchases for this project.

GPS Aspect

The hardware has arrived and will be set up shortly.  The GPS to microprocessor code has yet to be compleated.  The code will do the following:

Initialize:

a. Clear the recieving buffer.

b. Let the chip know data is incoming.

c. Set up timers to accomplish reading the incoming data.

Main:

a. Read in some data until the buffer full flag is set.

b. Count through this recieved sequence until 2 commas are found.  If 2

   commas are not found, clear the buffer and read in more data.

c. Read in number (string) and convert to a number.

Digital Compass Aspect

The initial goal of implementing the Dinsmore 1490 digital compass was accomplished last week.  Further research as to what registers the compass data is stored in was performed over the last week.  Connectors were purchased to ease the connection of the compass sensor to the microcontroller board.  In the next week, the program code will be cleaned up, the register address/es where the compass data is stored will be available for use with the GPS aspect of the project code, and the connectors will be used to connect the compass sensor with the microcontroller board.