SOURCE Week 1

Posted by Nicole Sharp on 08 June 2005 at 11:46

So work on the SOURCE project is going along, slowly but surely. After speaking with Dr. White and Dr. Willis, it looks like I will be doing pretty much what I described in my earlier entry. I'm using a wind tunnel on the 8th floor of Glennan, along with the RoboMoth robot engineered by the Biorobotics group that lives up there. (I can say things like this, of course, because I've been spending a lot of time up there since January.)

This week has involved reading lots of documentation files and toying with some of the programming language used to control RoboMoth's motors. I'm not actually using RoboMoth as an autonomous robot or for its tracking abilities, but simply as a sensor whose movements I can easily control. Unfortunately for me, it looks like I won't be able to write a program to move the robot and record my data without using more advanced programming than the sort that I learned five semesters ago in ENGR 131. I didn't quite expect this sort of learning experience when I started out, but I'm game. I have a feeling that I'll be very glad that I've kept up with at least a little bit of programming by playing with PHP in my spare time.

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  • 1
    Got Gravatars?

    neuman said

    On 19 June 2005 at 17:44

    Sounds cool! How big is the wind tunnel you are working with?

  • 2
    Got Gravatars?

    Nicole Sharp said

    On 20 June 2005 at 09:03

    It's a bit of an odd wind tunnel, as its fan pushes the air rather than pulling it. So the test section and "exhaust" are the same size, which is a little more than a yard wide. The wind tunnel is identical to one in the biology department.

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