Whiz Kid Woes

During the last week of our summer vacations we worked quite a bit on the hardware of our project. Here are some pictures of the hardware modules that we’ve been working on:

The first two circuits above are a part of remote control circuitry which operates over RF. The real brain of the circuit is the SCTX2B IC in the fourth picture. We tried tapping into the IC pins, it works on active low and sending signals is a breeze. Finally the third circuit above is an 8-bit parallel port interface on a PCB, which we did in the first year of engineering. It has been practically redone and is enhanced on the circuit level. It’ll allow us to send signals through the parallel port to control the vehicle. We still have to mount the wireless camera over our vehicle and determine an optimum height for it. After that we’ll worry about protecting the camera from movement vibrations, we’ll try to minimize it as much as possible.

I’ve finally started to take serious interest in the final year engineering project we have to work out this year. I’ve been staying up late in the nights to read up on image processing and video processing. I’ve found some excellent references on the internet and one of them is David Young’s lectures. We have moved all project-related work to a wiki, which contains tons of information on our progress. We’ve also decided to create the entire final year project report into a wiki and later import it into a Word document!

I also did a basic review of Microsoft Robotics platform today and concluded that we cannot integrate it with our project at this time. The platform looks promising though.