Boards are In!

The boards finally came in the mail! They actually have our names written on them XD. I cut them up and David is putting on the voltage regulator right now because he's much better at soldering. I'll do some of the easier stuff like beacons later on so that I don't mess up anything important.  

Schematic/Artwork Pictures

Artwork

Dave is back today. He's been sick the whole week. We started placing the components ont the artwork and deciding how we want to lay it all out. Hopefully in a couple days, we'll be ready to order the board.

Board Mechanical Artwork

I did the board layout today and got the screw hole locations measured and added them to the artwork. It's harder than you think....

Footprints anyone?

We haven't made a blog entry in a while already. However, there isn't really much to report. We've been working on the schematic mostly and it's proving to be a bigger pain than we anticipated. We have to find/make and add a footprint to every single component individually. It's very time consuming and the software we're using is pretty buggy so it can get a little frustrating at times. But we're almost done so it's all good.

Too Much Wasted Time

Today we tried to go from the number of bits to our actual binary message. To simplify things we coded in visual c++ rather than MP Labs. It took a while but we got the number of bits translated into binary by storing the binary message in another array. After we got that right we tried to do the same thing by bit shifting within one variable (to save memory) rather than using arrays. In the end we got that method mostly working but we decide to stick with the arrays because we didn't have any problems with it and we aren't worried about memory space. Tomorrow we will try and implement that into our code.

More IR Detector-Emitter

Ilia was away... agian. This left me with pretty much nothing to do because Ilia was doing most of the programming work before and didn't comment. I hate to admit it but I sort of need him for the programming. So... not much got done.

10101010101

We got the code working today!
It is able to successfully transmit/read bits.
It goes like this:

Read the current pulse time

The pulse duration is equal to the previous time, subtracted from the current time.

The number of bits in each wave is the pulse duration divided by 1300 (one bit).

This gives an output similar to this:

1 1 2 1 2 1 1 1 4 2

Each digit represents an edge of the wave and their values are how many bits are in each wave.

So in binary it would look like:

01001001 01000011

If you still don't get it, this should clear it up:

1 | 1 | 2   | 1 | 2   | 1 | 1 | 1 |4        | 2
0 | 1 | 00 | 1 | 00 | 1 | 0 | 1 |0000 | 11

Convert that to Ascii and you get: "I C" ( My Initials XD )

Ground

We spent half an hour today debugging the beacon circuit. It was working and then all of a sudden stopped. We hooked up the scope and found that the pulse was around 44khz and it was supposed to be at 36khz. We fixed the code but the receiver still wasn't picking it up. Then we found the problem, we accidentally reversed the  output and ground pins on the detector *facepalm* .  However, if this didn't happen we wouldn't have found the problem with the frequency. Anyway, after reprogramming the beacon, we slightly modified the input capture code that we used with the digital compass to work with the beacon detector. It doesn't really work yet though, so that's what we'll be working on tomorrow.

IR Beacon-Detector Cont.

We continued working on the IR beacon-detector. We moved our program for the beacon from our emulator on to our actual PIC so we can use the emulator to get the detector working. To do this we had to actually breadboard the beacon circuit and figure out how to use the programmer. We also had to change a lot of our code to go on the PIC we are using for the beacon because it's a different type of PIC than the one we are emulating.