Mar.26 Mechanical arm and claws

Looks like the first lab exercise is changing from the line follower to a mechanical arm because another institute deals with moving robots and automation. At the moment it seems the need for  hysteresis controller is gone.


Main Task:  Using IEC61499 and the Lego robot claw arm grab an object and drop into boxes of various heights. 
Use step-wise refinement:  
1. Motor movements (up/ down; open/close; right/left)
2. Safety shut-off: Stop with touch indicates down
3. Do something: 
    3a. Grab ball
    3b. Go up with ball
    3c. Move to right or left with ball
    3d. Release ball in a box
4.  Do all steps in 3 together:
    4a. using switches
    4b. Automatically


Advanced task: (from  NXTprograms Robot Arm)  Exchange two balls.


The NXTprograms Robot Arm is used as the base design.
It used 3 motors:

• circling (left/right)
• up/down
• open/close of a claw

A touch sensor is included as a switch.


Added for the lab:

• LED for indicator  
• Touch sensor on arm attached to the claw motor to know when the robot arm is down

claw with touch sensor for down

3 claws are being tested

1. NXTprograms Robot Arm  4 prong claw with 2 prongs fixed
• simple 
• fixed in one position on one side
2. 3 Prong Claw (not sure original author)
• NXT Claw Car with Game Controller - NXT Programs steps 25-32

• LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Build Instructions 3-prong Claw

3. 4 Prong Claw with full motion  (land version of our team's waterbotics claw in Jan.)
• must be fixed  on the side, so doesn't move 
• uses gear train

Mar.12 Intro to IEC61499 try 2

Installation distracts from explaining IEC61499

Installation:  Using the Quick set-up from the Fordiac DevWiki

• German and English versions have different things, not just different order 
• with cygwin - chose a fast mirror .... its slow and is the bottleneck
• often sooo long it end, but faster second time
• posix make doesn't work if they forgot cygwin\bin and/or cmake\bin in path
• test in command window if bash and cmake work
• forte import using hg seemed to confuse both more than expected.
• German version is much different than English, although both ways work.
• German assumes you are using the development version of everything
• English assume you get a version of IDE and Forte somewhere and says what to do with it.
• Probably a how to get and hg for beginners section or link is needed
• Got through SystemTest start 
• And forte compile - hopefully later today

March 6 State-of -art 1499 tutorials

• Holobloc tutorial explains the concepts
• http://www.ece.auckland.ac.nz/~vyatkin/publ/IES_Mag_1499.pdf  
• +Book V. Vyatkin, IEC 61499 Function Blocks for Embedded and Distributed Control Systems Design. USA: ISA-o3neida, 2012

• NxtStudio  (has graphical view)
• https://sites.google.com/site/iec61499nxtstudio/workshop-tutorial
• https://sites.google.com/site/iec61499nxtstudio/workshop-tutorial/download  tutorial videos (draft?)

• Book  R. Lewis, Modelling control systems using IEC 61499: applying function blocks to distributed systems, Institution of Electrical Eng, 2001.  
• http://ie.rutgers.edu/resource/research_paper/paper_05-017.pdf

Looked ISA books  - nothing recent  Vyatkin and Zoitl

Good quote: “Our universities not only need to teach the traditional tools, but they also need to teach real-life tools.” Kodosky 

Googled: teaching event programming:

Teaching Event Driven Programming and State Machines   related to Pearson online

Cleanroom programming  related to white-box / black box programming

Event-driven for CS1

Event Driven Programming (also good rubric

Broadcasting and Receiving - Teach Me Programming