- From desparation to clean board
- Read our winning contest report here
The Car
The car involves several important circuits.
They are listed depicted in the diagram below.These were powered by the Texas Instruments MSP430. While this is a very old piece of hardware (you can kill this board by injecting 5V and USB power at the same time!), we made it work with some persistent programming.
Here's our final demo video for this class.
Design Contest
Perfect
The "perfect track" was a contest that tested how closely you could tune your car to run on a given track. Understanding how basic control theory, BIBO stability, and signals inputted from the car's microcontroller was critical to provide accurate and precise parameters for the car to follow the given track. We came out second place.
Design Contest
We added several new features, as described by the report linked above. We included reversible motors using a H-bridge circuit. We also added joystick control and a LCD interface. These additions required me to write a C program that extended what was developing during the class to use the joystick and LCD interface. First, we simualated the circuits in TinkerCad. Once we had some confidence that our circuit would work, we built it on a second breadboard attached to the body of the car. We won an honorable mention for this design track.