Week 2, Initial Hardware Setup

The Plan
Discussion
Assignment
Materials

The Plan

For this week, we will meet at 8:30am in room 200, Deschutes Hall. There were at least a couple of people with 10:00am classes following this seminar so we will keep the schedule here. This week will be hardware week to get things in your hands and get started. The plan is:

Discuss IR Communication Challenges
Quick Demonstration of SensorStick
Pick 3 Candidate Projects
Establish Project Shared Needs
Specify Needs for First Milestone
Distribute Initial Hardware
Begin Work on First 2 Programming Challenges

Contents

Discussion

We will start by discussing some of the obvious challenges we will need to overcome in establishing a multi-node, self-organizing IR network. This will help us reign in our expectations and establish the critical areas we will be working in with our project.

The demonstration this week is a laser scanner on a stick named the SensorStick. This has been used in Urban Search and Rescue exercises to characterize chambers and voids in rubble piles.

We also need to establish three candidate project outcomes that all share a common multi-node communication structure. We can then begin specifying that structure and figuring out ways to organize our limited IR payload. This effort and what we learn in actually coding this fundamental structure will help narrow our candidate project.

Contents

Assignment

We have two coding efforts this week. Part one is pretty simple, you just need to complete a "Hello World" program that executes on startup and displays some text on the console. Essentially, this is outlined in the "Console Getting Started Guide" (find is your friend on the website).

The second coding effort is slightly more difficult. You need to write a program that broadcasts an IR packet once a second. Each team has a unique ID (see the resource page for the team list) and that is the number to broadcast in the packet. We can then use this code later to split into team pairs and move about the building to characterize the rough distance the IR transmission is capable of.

We will be doing this characterization in the third week after our discussion. Each team needs to come up with these 2 programs (hello world and 1Hz broadcast) for week 3 to complete the assignment this week.

Software

Currently, you will be downloading the Console and GP applications for your platform. The Linux support of these two is minimal so for now, it is probably easier done with Windows or Mac OS X downloads within your teams. We have a new implementation of the Console that will be available in the next week or two in Beta form for all platforms (including Linux) that we can migrate to. The GP and other applications will follow as well, although a bit later.

Contents

Materials

Each team needs a laptop (or two) to get started. Ideally, both team members bring a laptop and switch back and forth so both are up and running.

We will be handing out the initial hardware (BrainStem, batteries, charger, connection cables, and battery pack). The additional components will be added in week 3 before we characterize the IR.

Revision History:

2009-01-14: added a note about software versions
2009-01-13: Switched the Week 2 and Week 3 demonstrations
2009-01-07: fixed broken resources link
2009-01-07: Small Updates after first week's class