Personal Summary

I purchased the servo motors and helped solve for the needed dimensions of the two driving gears for either tank tread chain. Additionally, I tested the servo motors once their potentiometers had been glued in roughly the middle of the 0 to 180 degree range. Using a potentiometer from the sparkfun kit, the degree value which became the middle of the range (0 rotational speed) was found and noted. Also, the IR sensor had to become functional through a few methods. The very first was obviously to download the IR library from Ken Shirriff's blog. Using some sample IR receiver code, and once the IR sensor had been plugged in correctly, the serial monitor which printed out what the IR sensor received from the TV remote revealed some combinations of numbers and letters. Through some help, we found out that the sensor was receiving numbers in hexadecimal. In order to incorporate the signals from the remote into the code, the numbers were converted to base 10 and used in the if statements which wrote to the servos. After this had been done, it was mostly trial and error and conversion. A forward, backward, and stop button on the remote was coded for each motor on the tank.

One motor did not have a clear center point in the range, so it didn't completely stop when the mid range servo.write function was used. This will require more testing. Overall, my focus was on the coding and motors, but I did help with the design of the tank's gears and treads.

-Kevin Cerritelli