All Blog Posts (57)

Man, Wednesday section is packed. I don't think I'll go back to Wednesday sessions unless I REALLY need the time... lots of people who didn't have labs must have come also, and the tools were in high demand, along with the workspace.

Today, both motors were successfully mounted to the base. The transmission system is complete! I am very proud of my handiwork, as it took me around 2-3 hours to get the alignment of the gears perfect. The result is worth it though - I'll post a…

Today focussed mostly on the fabrication of the drive base module. I was able to complete the entire base, including the mounting of the motors, however my team decided that a full length chassis bar would be more structurally sound than the current half length, and since this is easy to change and mount to the existing base, we decided to do this. The picture below shows the base sans one motor and the cross support for the arm I started during the last hour - I have to remember to take…

And so the weekend of typing, calculating, planning, shopping, and unfortunately not sleeping comes to a close. The infamous report covers have been found, the proposals printed, and are now no longer our problem.

Though it was possible for me to complete my sections of the proposal in 3 long spurts (Friday from 10-2:30 am, Saturday from 11 - 1pm, 5pm-12:30am, and Sunday 11am-8pm) I would not want to do that again. A good target week to start the final report is probably week…

It's probably too late, but here is a VERY handy web-applet for drawing flow charts:

http://www.lucidchart.com/

It's actually the first result Google finds if you search for "flow chart maker," so anyone who looked for one has likely already found this. But here it is anyways.

This is where I will be for most likely the next 6 hours. Got my hot chocolate, laptop for media entertainment and information, and the writing instruments. Its figure drawing time, then hitting the electromech specifications last.

At least the conceptualization section is finished!…

Cassie's post reminded me of a nifty application that can be used for AHP analysis, which the appendix to the Wikipedia article on AHP links to.

http://www.superdecisions.com/

It's free; all you have to do is set up an account and request a serial key. Once you download it (the Windows-compatible version works on W7 too), it may be awkward to learn how use it. Here's what we need to know:

1) To create…

Ok, if anyone else is planning on making an AHP for conceptualization in the proposal, here's a fool proof method:

1) Follow this wikipedia example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Analytic_Hierarchy_Process/Example_Leader

2) In the mysterious parts where they get decimal numbers (and are actually solving for eigenvectors of 4x4 matrices...) use THIS handy…

Hey 1T4's and all others,

I was having some trouble doing the survey, particularly the "industry" survey, as I drew a blank to how to access patents. I often came across ones where I had to pay, or had poor search methods, etc.

I went to the Engineering Library over the weekend, and they directed me to:…

Hey everyone,

After going through the list of suppliers for the project, it seems that we've found the same thing- a lot of them have closed up shop.  So I'm going to try my best to keep this list up to date with URLs, names, addresses and phone numbers.  If you want anything added, just comment!

Ability Metals & Machine - www.abilitymetals.com

963 Brock Road, Pickering, ON, L1W…

This morning, Jenny, Cassie, Kristine and myself missioned down to Solway to go check out the kind of scrap metal we would be able to work with (in time for our practical sessions on monday and tuesday). 

Though I was expecting the building to look like it did (it is a scrap metal place) it was not Home Depot like (by any means :P) and so the…

Post 1 – January 10^th, 2012

It’s official! Our team has been chosen. Mason, Tom and myself will be working on the problem assigned to the Tuesday Lab Section, the Sticker Inspector Machine. If you are in the Tuesday section also, feel free to leave a comment. It…

blog post 1 – January 10^th, 2012

Team Selection, Problem Acquisition and First Brainstorm

It’s official! Our team has been chosen. Mason, Tom and myself will be working on the problem assigned to the Tuesday Lab Section, the Sticker Inspector Machine.…

For simplicity's sake, up until this point I have been keeping all of my LCD writing functions and tables in the same file, but now that I am cleaning up my code in its near-polished state, I'm looking to move my tables to a separate file.

I have no problem with all of the basic steps, but since I am using relocatable code generated with the code flag, the linker always puts my tables in the last part of the program memory, which makes the tables work incorrectly (as…

Here's my RTC sample code, ported for PIC18F4620. I added SSPIF support but disabled the interrupts and changed quite a bit of code in the basic I2C low-layer macros, including some #v()-literals to save space.

I wrote it in emacs, and have no clue how to use MPLAB. Sorry :)

Also note that it's relocatable code and full of my own debugging lines. You may have to play around with it to get it to work with your code. But it does definitely work the way it is…

There seems to be a mistake, because the code did not work, and after my change, it did work.

MainLoop

    bsf        ADCON0,2        ;start conversion and wait for it to complete

    btfsc    ADCON0,2

    goto    $-2

goto $-2 is wrong, because it goes back 2 lines and starts the conversion all over again. You'll want to goto $-1 instead, to just test until the conversion is done.

However, I would reccommend this…

The information regarding the EEPROM is minimal in the manual and you will need to go into the datasheets to get a bigger picture (as is the case for pretty much everything). This post is just to add to the stuff the manual is missing, so that you do not have to go searching through the datasheet.

First off, the datasheet itself uses VALUE and ADDR as registers to contain the data it would like to store. If you implement the code as is, it will not work. You will need to…

http://dozydagger.com/misc/mpasm-lcd-writer.html

You know what I say to tables? Well, I don't say it, because I am not the type to publicly use such language, but once you get past the character limit it causes problems that can be tricky even if the solution is known.

Here's a work around that I'm using. "can" wasn't worth making a table for. A table would take 4 lines. If you include the code to…

• Get the address of index zero of the table
• Add the table index to the address
• Jump to that address

The table itself is a sequence of retlw instructions, which put a value into W and return. (dt and related directives are just assembler shorthand for inserting many retlws.)



A first try at implementing a table lookup thus looks like this:…