Refresh!

We were either too busy working on the mouse or we weren't working at all;

Whatever happened in all these days, one thing which we cannot even dream of forgetting was, is, will always be -MOHIT TANEJA. There are geniuses they say, who leave a room for you to believe that you can also be, if only you worked hard and then there are those who are what they are and you just can't guess how they can be what they are. Mohit Taneja is like the latter. 

You travel 20,000 Km - not to spend your life  in the confines of a lab, plagued with the uncertainities of life and breathe the fumes of solder and stale basement air; you expect life to be merrier, made of some better- happy stuff. But then some choose to make their life tougher and I thank Mohit for everything he did for us.

I hereby wish to propose that the mouse in making be called MOTA for very obvious and deserving reasons.

Well efforts for the greater good shall continue in the year 2009-10.

_______________________________[period]

CORRECTOMUNDO

Ok....the reason why we haven't been writing for a long time is there's been nothing to write about....which means we've been working on the same thing since november 6 without ne success...but for today

now what the thing is...i aint gonna tell....coz the idea itself is so novel...itll be a shame risking revealing it for the sake of a show -off blog entry

just tht me and ankush have been working on the code for two weeks...and were partially successful and dhruv was completely successful with his hardware...

now today with ankush in solan and dhruv (our man in Amsterdam) forgetting his lenses...it was up to me to try my luck at the poker table (read Keil U-vision) ..now ive been at many WPT final tables....but this one was like playingPhil Hellmuth heads up...and i, well finally managed to get the better of him.

Special thanks here to Deepak and G Sid for helping modify a section of the code...which i always knew was wrong but never had the guts to change....

Now for the Chassis.......which of course shall be built using every trick learnt in VM Physics

Second time with the ADC

Seems like someone's been on a shopping spree. After the half yearlies we were greeted in the lab with new ADCs, LCDs and of course wire strippers.

Saturday

Replaced the ADC in the previously made circuit. To display the reading, dropped the (disastrous) idea of using LEDs and opted for the LCD. I ended up with a circuit which reminded me of spaghetti. On plugging the µC we noticed it did not have a potential drop of 5V across the Vcc and Gnd but something of the order of 4.8V. Sir suggested we had fried the µC (yet again) and as we had no spares..... had to spend the rest of the day listening to 7th graders asking me "bhaiya yeah kya hai?" (pointing to the spaghetti).

Monday
Ankush and Vishesh worked on the code and finaly managed to make the compiler admit and display "0 Errors ; 0 Warnings".

Teusday
Ankush promplty brought 3 8052s neatly arranged in a round box (and exclaimed with gleaming eyes "teen aur ghar par pade hain"). Even after replacing the µC, the 4.8v potential drop persisted so we tried using a new 7085 voltage regulator IC. This worked like a breeze and the circuit began to work in expected ways. With two hours of school left, the LCD finaly showed us some readings and they changed according to the IR sensor! Now that was a true "tell your grandchildrens" moment. We finally got some indication that we were on the right track. Though in subsequent attempts the LCD displayed nothing at all (i wondered wether i had knocked some wire out, while exclaiming "Booya!"). Using the multimeter me and ankush checked each and every connection while vishesh worked on the code. Found a suspicious connection, but as school was almost over , we packed up and called it a day.

Wednesday
After wracking our brains over what could have gone wrong with the circuit (and sawing a 8052 in half), finally mustered up the will to resolder the "suspicious" connection and it worked!
I had bought my camera so i busied myself in making a video while the dudes worked on displaying the output of all the three sensors on the LCD (right-left-center).
This too worked superbly. All in all was a super day for us.

I didn't know about it, seriously!

check the following link. the guys at IIT Bombay have put up the inventory of about everything we need:
http://techfest.org/competitions/techtronics/micromouse/Tutorial%20Micromouse.zip

zzzz!

Important considerations

Some important factors/ features we need to consider, as pointed out by sir while we design the mouse are as following:

• the voltage drop across the collector and the emitter in a BC 547 is 0.6 V, hence we can consider AC197 - germanium tranistor which has a voltage drop of 0.2 V.
• Light sensor can be given 3.7 V directly from the Li-ion battery as compared to 5V it is currently getting though 7805 IC.
• As LCD is only required for debugging and not every time we can put a manual switch to control its On/Off state.
  

and we need to search around for suitable battery pack and its charger, or we can make one with Nokia battery - BL-5F or BL-5C. but then we would need a custom way to charge the battery pack.

LCD

well...it started with a series of phone calls at 9:00pm and some rumours tht sir was going to bring the lcd the next day

we all thought that programming an lcd was the most difficult thing in the world (after making a micromouse and convincing monica bellucci to go out on a date with you (for the other guys not for me))....so we all turned up expecting a hard days work...sat around with the mazidi....figured out what rs, rw en etc meant (though we still do not know what strobing a pin means)...nebody who has an idea may kindly leave a comment

pleasantly surprised when malhotra finished the hardware in about 5 minutes( or was it 6) and then tried to be modest about it.....the programming part was quite easy...especially since we have got the hang of C

now for the adc....lets wait and watch

MOTORS AND BATTERY

what about the torque of the motor....and how did u get the dimensions...if theres ne mail tht i dont have pls send it to me

also the 2000mah battery pack means tht we need about 3-4 battery packs so we can run the mouse around for enuf time

and about the adc....dont worry its gonna work....we know the software is correct..so is the hardware