User:Aarnous8817/project 1

Cheryl Campo

Please delete everything in italics as you follow the instructions.

Week0 Preferences
Autonomous Power Wheel

Project Preference

 * Autonomous Power Wheel
 * Escher
 * Useless box

Problem Statement
A Powerwheel toy vehicle is being modified so that it is able to move autonomously using sensing, programming, and physical mechanisms.

Project Plan
The plan is to expand the vehicle's abilities to not only move forward autonomously but backwards as well.

Week1 Narrative
In the first week, mechanical components needed for this project were gathered and investigation was conducted into what would be needed in order to achieve backwards motion. Results and outcomes are as follows:


 * A piece of wood that is not so big and suits the back of the car without blocking the way of the battery nor so small that a weak wind would take it down was procured.

Week2 Narrative
In week two, several tasks were attempted:


 * Finding the most appropriate wires to connect the vehicle to the ultrasonic sensor


 * Finding a way to pass wires from the back side of the car to front side

1- For the first point, wires in the lab were not long enough to satisfy the length needed for the project so the ends of longer wires were stripped, connected to one another, and taped to form longer ones.

Week 3 Narrative
This week, two kind of sensors ( RB - Plx- 73 and HC-Sr-04) were compared and the following was determined:

The ultra sonic sensor that we are using ( RB - Plx - 73) only has the ability to stop the car once an obstacle is faced; it does not give orders to change direction or go in the reverse direction.

The other sensor ( HC - Sr - 04 ) has the ability to give orders to turn or go backwards.

Week 4 Narrative
A programming problem was determined to be the goal to achieve by solving it and tasks were put all on programming. Three programming problems were determined as obstacles against our goal ( Having the car to go backwards) :
 * Having the gas motor to stop pushing gas every 10 seconds.
 * Having the vehicle to do the same forward movement that was done in the video.
 * Practical application for our backward movement by testing the programming that was created.

Approaching the problem: There were two different programming setup :
 * The first thing to be done is to lock up the documentation on the Autonomous power wheel page in Wikiversity.

The first one was vehicle movement. (1, 2, 3, 4)


 * After locking up the programming on the wiki page, testing the programming on the vehicle outside was the following step, yet on the wiki page, there was no one programming setup for the whole movement, actually the sensors’ programming and the car one were laid out separately when the Arduino can only read one programming setup, so a decision was made to try three different  ways of orders  with regards to the two setups:

The computer in this case could not read the programming giving a reason of having one order with two different definitions. Similar error was faced with the same reason given. This way did not work at all and appeared to be one bad solution.
 * Putting the Sensors’ programming first followed by the cars’ :
 * Putting the cars’ Programming first followed by the sensors’ :
 * Integrate the two programming together by putting one line of the sensors’ programming followed by one line of cars’ :

Next Steps:
 * Figuring out how to fix the errors determined by the computer.
 * Testing the backward programming on the vehicle after seceding with having the car do what it did before.