We spent a large portion of last week writing our preliminary design package and designing exact interfaces between various parts of the project. Most work done last week was creating protocols for devices to talk to each other and ensuring our design strategy will work.

We have a working solution for a single sonar rangefinder. We will continue to work on this to create an array of three rangefinders, which we believe to be a minor extension.

We decided to get an RC tank similar to the one used by another group. We have dismantled the tank and probed the control lines for the servos. We found the tread servos to operate at a constant voltage difference. This is good because we plan to directly control these servos while in autonomous mode. The turret control however is a digital signal. Since we do not know what this signal is, we will avoid interfacing with it directly and only control it via the RC controller.

We found a child's camcorder that works perfectly for our purposes. This digital camcorder take video, converts it into NTSC format and broadcasts it to a remote basestation via a 2.4 GHz link. We will then take this signal, digitize it with the video decoder on the XSV board and display it through the VGA out.

With our design now specified for the most part, we can move onto implementation. Brent will continue to work with the rangefinders. Once he has an array of three working off a single 8051, he will move onto to implementing the handshake protocol between the microcontrollers on the platform. Curtis will look into the video formatting and convert the output of the decoder (YUV 4:2:2) into RGB that the RAMDAC can display. Daniel will work on user interface issues, specifically adapting a keyboard module from CSE 467 to our design and interfacing the RC controller into the XSV board.

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