Meeting Notes 9-26-12

Meeting Type: Advisor meeting

Attending:

Advisor(s): Dr. Clark
Members: All
Excused:

Action Items

1. Send him website address and individual blogs
2. Make an organized list of what we have and what we need
3. Make weekly presentations to keep whole team on track with what's going on

Meeting Topics

Important Notes

Transcript (Notes)

• Looked at the Gantt chart export
  • Formatting
• We have turned it on, but only for a short time because of demo program torpedo firing
• We have all the things we want the sub to do
  • Not clear to Dr. Clark what can be reused from present
  • Not clear to Dr. Clark what the design procedure
• We will be meeting with Ryan on Friday to take it apart
• We can't take it apart right now
  • Early stages of wheel spinning - very bad
  • Don't do stupid things, but also don't do nothing
  • We can't put it back together
  • We don't know how to safely take it apart
  • We're hoping to use the present robot as a debugging console while we redesign a new one
  • The connections are pretty fragile, so it's very difficult to maintain the connections
• We've been working on how we would put it together ourselves with the parts that we have
• We've also been designing the
• This week
  • Friday we take apart
  • MEs will meet up to finalize design
  • EEs have been researching how to control the motors
    • Voltage regulators aren't needed
    • The current research has been emailed
    • Today we will talk about what we have to do
• We should be able to tell Dr. Clark about what's going on to show we know what we're doing
  • Also helpful for giving presentations
  • He doesn't want us to waste time making presentations to him
  • We need to capture all this information in easy to understand ways to facilitate intra-group communications
• Communication is extremely important for such a large group
  • Put together a few slides each week to convey information to each other
    • What we'e done
    • What we're planning
    • Very good for having images for big presentations later
  • Plus, we can show them to Dr. Clark
• The Gantt chart doesn't show enough to explain our understanding of the nitty-gritty stuff about the
• Wants a list of ALL THE THINGS THAT WE NEED TO DO FOR THE PROJECT, what we need, what we're gonna test, what we've done
  • Wants us to be organized
  • Presentation to show Dr. Clark
    • Don't waste a lot of time!
    • Here's what we did last week, here's what we're doing next week, and here's how it fits into the bigger picture
    • "Show, don't tell" - our verbal-only explanations are not getting our points across
  • Here's our motor drivers, here's what we need to do, here's what we think we've done
  • Dr. Clark would like us to illuminate the project a bit more for him, he has no idea what is going on.
    • He's trying to save us long term by forcing us to make good documentation habits
• Voltage regulators are a point of failure
  • Regulators can sometimes dip and cause all electronics to reset
  • Other end of things has us giving a different power supply to each system
• Get each component working before putting them all together
  • Never trivial to get things put together
• Same time next week

Question

• What kind of batteries should be use? We could get away with a lot of different batteries, but we don't need to really worry about weight
  • Nickel metal hydrate, lithium ion.
  • Reasonable to just put thrusters on one battery, then electronics on another

Question

• How to get into the lab for Friday?
  • It's not working right now
  • Code: (2,4) then 3
  • One key will be in Mechatronics 1 lab
    • That lab should be open, or we can get someone to let us in

Group Notes