analyti

We had three goals for this week. The first goal was to test the battery pack on the entire program to see how long it would run and to try and use the information to make the battery life indicator for the TFT display. The second goal was to create a wiring schematic for use in the presentation, report, and for our use when we start soldering all the wires. The third goal was to test the accuracy of the speed code. 

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On Friday, Avery ran all of the components off the battery pack for 3 hours at which time, everything was running at extremely high temperatures, so the battery was unplugged at this time. Although we didn't run it for the full desired 5 hours, the battery indicator on the battery pack itself only lost one of four bars, so for us we can assume that it can last a minimum of 5 hours. Throughout the duration of this experiment, the analogRead program did not show any voltage drop that could be used for the battery life display. We plan to talk to Professor Ejaz to see if we can incorporate the existing display from the battery pack. 

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We spent some time creating a rough sketch of the wiring schematic on paper earlier in the week. Sean then created a much cleaner version which can be seen below. With some extra time, Sean continued modeling the front module which can also be seen below. 

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We also had trouble with our third goal of testing the accuracy of the speed. After increasing the desired distance of the LIDAR and slowly moving a car towards in, the program did not function as desired. After running the test program provided from Garmin on the LIDAR sensor, it seems that our sensor isn't taking accurate measurements past roughly 600cm. The max rang is specified at 40m so this is a big issue. Avery is going to call Garmin and talk to someone who can hopefully help us resolve this issue so we can obtain results.