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

Project Statement

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

Week 8

Philip Johnson - Motor Control Aspect

I built a new compass board so that there will be no shorting of contacts on the board.  I also rewired the new RJ-45 to DB-9 adapters so the GPS can be attached to the microprocessor.  I created a schematic for the adapter and the compass board so that there will be documentation for our project.  I tried to connect the GPS to a computer, with Greg's guidance, so that we would better understand how the data is transferred from the GPS to the controller.  But we were unable to achieve any positive results.  I continued with programming the drive system, but no major changes have occurred.  There is still confusion about how the mixing of two signals will be achieved.

Zachary Chaves - GPS Aspect

The hardware for the GPS is all set up.  Phil and Greg attempted testing it on a laptop with no success early Thursday.  The code for the microcontroller is pretty much all laid out now.  A few functions and a few variables are still necessary to make it complete.  The most complex of these functions is the function to receive data from the GPS and return numbers for position.  This section is fully commented for what it is supposed to be doing.  This is being done rather slowly and carefully because initialization of the GPS will take 5 minutes.  Of course, this time can be shortened with an initialization function
but while we are still a little unsure of how this will work we will experiment the long way.

Gregory Wilkosz - Digital Compass Aspect

Further work to streamline the code for use with the actual Zilog Z8 board was performed over the last week.  Phil and I connected the Garmin GPS LVS-16 to his laptop on Thursday in an attempt to view the data output.  We were unsuccessful in achieving GPS output.  We will be performing further tests in order to accomplish this in order to implement Zac’s coding for the GPS portion of the project. 

Miscellaneous

As far as the testing grounds for our project, we have decided on Fairfield Way on the UConn campus.  This is a convenient location to provide land-based testing of our completed project when the time comes.  For water-based testing, we initially wanted to use Mirror Lake as the location.  The area where the water meets land, however, is too steep for our vehicle to make a safe entrance and exit of the water.  We are still undecided on a water-based testing location.  Most likely it will be somewhere off campus and will have to be recorded on video for presentation on Senior Design Day.