User blog:Brandonlock1213/Spring 2011- Meeting 5 Summary

Electronics
Justin and I had some success earlier this week with the IR receivers and beacon. It turns out the IR receivers output digital pulse width signals. The idea is to take a large number of reads and count how much lows there are to determine the strength of the signal. Here's a bit of the code that does this: for(counter1 =1;counter1<=1000;counter1++) { delay_us(100); if(is_digital_input_high(IO_C4) == 0) { value1++;} while(is_digital_input_high(IO_C4) == 0) { delay_us(5);} } We tested two IR receivers at 180 and 90 degree angles. Everything worked well except for when too close up. We can simply subtract the counts of opposing receivers to see if there is enough of a difference in the readings to tell which direction the beacon is.

Hardware
We filled the blimp today at CVS at the start of the meeting. On the way back we lost a substantial amount of air and the blimp was unable to hold up the gondola. We were only getting about 80g of lift. I'm going to try one more time to get helium from a different source like Kroger; otherwise, we may have to buy a new envelope.

LED Matrix
The 700 multi-colored LED bundle looks great for our purposes. I'm considering going ahead and purchasing the bundle. It includes 175 LEDs each in R,G,B,and W for $151.