Day 18

Well after staring at the code for hours yesterday and still not getting anywhere I decide to take a nap and ended up waking up with an answer!  I had found a spot where the code might have been conflicting with itself.  We made the fixes by changing a variable here and there, then load it for another night run.  This time I launched the Cool Robot into autonomous mode from the Big House so that we could monitor it the whole time.  The robot went off with out a hitch!  As the robot went on its marry way I could see what waypoint it was on, how far it need to go to reach the next one, and what speed it was traveling.  I also could see what my code was doing by the print statements I added to it with regards to slowing down or stopping based on the robot's power conditions.  From this information I was able to tell that the robot wanted to drive at half speed but it wasn't, why?  Well I looked at the code I had just written and realize some of my logic was off, but the robot was still able to continue on, it would just have to stop instead.  Which it eventually did because it didn't have enough power.  Would it start back up again?  It did not, we had to restart it from the Big House, which wasn't hard to do but perplexing why the robot would not start back up on it own.

View of running CR from the Big House, the little dark box in the middle.

I made some changes to the drive code this morning, fixing the logic problem and moving a couple of things around.  Jim made some changes to the power code trying clear up some its logic.  But neither of us could figure out why the robot would not go again after stopping.  Anyways we load up our changes in hope to test on a fan survey for the air sampler...3 hours later and being very confused as to why autonomous mode would no longer work with the updates we went back to the code we used last night without any changes just so we could get the survey done.  Beside the code not doing exactly what we think it is suppose to be doing the Cool Robot is running great as long as it has enough power from the sun!