Escape From Uncanny Valley - olinrobotics/baymax GitHub Wiki

Mission Statement: Our current robot from Satyrnox looks creepy. We need a platform that people can unanimously agree on is not creepy, so we're going to work on taking our robot, and escaping from uncanny valley.

3/10/2018

I've created this wiki page so that we can have a centralized place to put all of the progress being made towards the escape from uncanny valley. Today, I've cloned the main repo from the Satyrnox Github so I now have the ability to turn on the robot and work with it. I also learned how to set up the robot. You have to reach under the stage, plug in the power supply (the big grey box with a red screen on it), switch the robot on from the black box on the right, and make sure the e stop is lit up. Then, plug your computer into the ardiuno, open up the main code in arduino IDE, and upload it to the robot. If you got the code from the main repo, you might have to make a new folder for the arduino code. If this happens, make sure you move the pitches file into that same folder. Congratulations! You can now type commands into the serial monitor to get the robot to do things. Make sure you're sending Noline, and not Newline messages.

-Ever

3/16/2018

I worked with Rocko to get our robot working again. For whatever reason, whenever we tried to run code on our robot prior,it simply wouldn't move. We figured out that there was actually a problem with the estop switch on the robot. It wasn't connected properly, and gave a constant reading of being estopped in the code. This prevented the rest of the code from running. Rocko and I took out the estop switch on the bot and resoldered the connections such that we shouldn't have that problem again. The robot can move according to commands now. :)

To troubleshoot, I started by uploading code to the robot to move individual servos to make sure all of the motors were working properly and none was just broken and drawing a ton of current. Rocko realized that we should probably also test the estop switch once we looked through the code, and changed and if statement so that it always read true instead of relying on the estop. When we did that, the robot could move just fine. We continued troubleshooting by reading what the estop was sending to the arduino, and found that the reading didn't change according to when we flipped the physical switch, so we knew the problem lied in the physical estop. We took the estop out and resoldered all of the connections, changed the code back to normal, and viola! Everything works just fine now.

-Ever