Bench Inspection Day

Bench inspection day photograph of our group, our poster and our creation - a wireless controlled robot using the Raspberry Pi.

Project Week 6 (Bench Inspection)

Today is the official end to the practical side of this project, as we presented our project to our project supervisor and a external assessor with the aid of our poster, log books and this very blog. In the morning before we were assessed we made final adjustments to the project (by now a robot controlled by the Raspberry Pi) and also attempted to get the second robot working after we successfully cloned another SD memory card. However, we had constant technical problems with the power and drive circuit which we cannot figured out throughout the day. Eventually we conducted both assessments with one robot only, but we were quiet disappointed that we didn't get both robots working and play football with them.

We were amazed with interests shown to our project by university academics and our fellow peers, we would like to thank them for their interest shown!

From Figure 1 as shown below, we have now completed all tasks and objectives set out for this project thus completed the practical side of this project as mentioned previously.

Figure 1: Gantt Chart after project week six

We will now move on to the paper work relating to this project, the thesis.

Circuitry

the circuit that is used to control the robot has been completed

Robotic Remote Control

After the completion of our raspberry pi's wireless control we then decided to attach it to a robot car that we can steer and control, find below a video of it in action.

DONE!!

Using ajax we were able to complete our goal, please view the video link below

Ajax - A new link to the chain

After we had managed to get the server to run our php code, we looked into how we are going to get the respected buttons to run there assigned php code this seemed like a straight forward procedure but after many attempts we were not able to produce the outcome that we wanted. the method we were using was to create a on-click event in our html page using jquery, this was supposed to trigger a function which contained its php code when the mouse clicked. This however is not possible since php is a server side function and cannot be ran directly from the client side html page. This meant that however we tried to manipulate the php code on the client side to preform the task it would simple just run the code in the html on the server side. 

A solution around this was to create several html page all linked to one another that would run the respected php code on the client side. This solution worked but came with the sacrifice of speed as the page would have to constantly reload and the browser would sometimes not responded to the link. this is he goal we wished to achieve but there must of been a much smpler more responsive way. This led us to the programming language called ajax a new link in our ever growing chain to find a solution.

The ajax language is another form of the java script, just like jquery but this is intended too send small requests to the server from a webpage without the need to reload/ refresh the page itself. This gave us the a solution to our problem we can use this functions to call the selected php code when requested, keeping the response time high and without the need of several pages. this is what we will be working on in these final days to have our project working the way we intend it too, preparing ourselves for the bench inspection this week.

Project Week 5 Timetable

In project week five, we hoped to apply the finishing touches to the project early on during the session by configuring out the control element of the web-page so that we can pick and choose which LED to switch on and or switch off. Then for rest of the day we will work on improving the project my adapting it to ultimately control a robot. However, the problem with achieving total desired control was actually bigger than we thought. It took us until end of the day before we fixed the problem, therefore we didn't have any time to make improvements on the project as hoped but then we did achieved the ultimate goal of this project by achieving "Wireless Control Using the Raspberry Pi"

As the above figure of our Gantt chart shows, the following week is bench inspection when our project will be assessed. We have now officially finished on the practical side on this project and moving onto the paper work, first by creating a poster for the upcoming bench inspection.