This week Robin joined the group and started making up for lost time. He got to know most of the other members and was quickly briefed on progress so far. Working towards our first tutor meeting, the group spend time on getting familiar with the Lego Mindstorms setup and on refreshing knowledge in C. For the latter purpose we've used a pdf of the book recommended by Van de Molengraft; 'The C Programming Language' by Kernighan and Ritchie. Also we've started reading in 'Real-time Concepts for Embedded Systems' by Qing Li and Caroline Yao.
We've inspected the Mars Rover as provided to us. Two concerns we have are (1) backlash in the steering mechanism and (2) differential behavior once one of the driving wheels gets stuck in a lake. Once stuck in a lake, we expect the Rover to keep circling around it with one wheel stuck because the wheel that's in the lake will be able to freely rotate (allowing the other driving wheel to execute force on the mars surface). Despite these concerns we'll try to focus on developing software first and leave hardware unchanged for a while. Current state of our software is that of being able to execute the various demo examples on the RCX.
A shared Dropbox folder is created in order to efficiently share project code amongst group members.
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