Week 29 - lglik/Portfolio GitHub Wiki

04/01/19 - 04/05/19

Day One:

I crimped connectors onto the four new signals wires (two pairs of ground and power). I decided that since I was already working on modifying signal wires, I might as well shorten the length of some old signals wires that were much longer than necessary. In the end, I cut to length, stripped, and crimped 8 wires which took some time. I also had to make some new power wires to go to the new relays and shorten some other power wires that no longer had to go as far. I shortened stripped, and crimped all of these power wires and finally connected everything. I then modified my code so that the signal to the relays connected the batteries to the load would always be high. This makes sense because they would automatically be low when the project is powered down.

The new signal wires and one of the two new relays.

Day Two:

Today I fished connecting the signal wires. This meant that all I had left to do to finish with the new wiring system was to find/make two power wires to go between the new relays and the the relays that used to connect directly to the load. stripped crimped and cut new power wires. I again brought out the bin with the old FRC wires and brought a longer wire over to my project and figured out where to cut it to form the correct length wires. I then stripped and crimped these wires and finally installed them. Like I did lat time when I thought I had finished the wiring, I had to use a multi meter to test that everything was connected correctly before plugging the batteries in. I checked that in one mode, one of the pairs of batteries was connected to each-other, the load, and not the charger and that the other batteries were only connected to the charger. Everything worked correctly in both modes.

Day Three:

I finished testing that everything was connected correctly and matched the schematic. I decided to hold off on installing the new batteries so that I could get a better comparison of the difference The next step was to see how long the batteries would last using the old batteries and the new wiring design. Therefore, I held off on installing the new batteries and instead plugged in the old ones to charge. While sitting there waiting for the batteries to charge I thought a little about the GUI. Currently the GUI allows users to design there own show, but the GUI and the process to do so is quite complex. Some children have refuse touch the project out of fear when I they see the GUI. Clearly something needs to change. I thought that a GUI with only a few buttons that each run a pre-made show would be much easier for small children to interact with and enjoy.

Day Four:

I decided that the GUI really did need to be changed, but I did not want to significantly change the current GUI. Therefore, I created a new separate GUI that I planned to connect to the other GUI by way of a button in the corner of the screen that would allow the user to switch between "simple mode" and "advanced mode". While pre-made shows are all well and good, I thought that the pre-made show should retain some direct inter-activeness with the trees themselves. I decided to copy and move over the code for the array of tree buttons in the advanced mode. Long-term I had plans for further changing how the tree buttons worked, but in the meantime I just tried to get the same code working on a new screen which proved to be pretty difficult, but I was successful in the end. I also added the button to go between the GUIs.

The beginning on the simply GUI screen with the tree widget from the advanced GUI.

Day Five:

After testing the new wiring with the old batteries, I determined that the batteries did charge much faster and that the project could run for longer, but not as long as I had hoped. I then started the process of installing the new batteries. First, I had to unplug and remove the old batteries from the project. Then, I cut off all the shrink wrap surrounding the bolts attaching the wires to the batteries so that I could access them. I then very carefully disconnected the wires, making sure that I did not accidentally short the batteries. I unpackaged all of the new batteries. I had to throw away most off the old nuts, bolts, and washers since they were pretty corroded. Mr. Harlow suggested that I use conductive grease to prevent this corrosion with new batteries. Thankfully, the new batteries also came with new components for fastening wires to them. I shrink wrapped the junctions of the wires and the batteries and finally plugged the batteries into the project. I let them charge over the weekend so that they would be fully charged when I returned on Monday.

One of the new batteries in the box it arrived in.