The first two days of my week I spent setting up a Debian server and filesharing container for the Shop. I wanted to take a quick break from working on my Micromouse and was reminded of my repeated frustrations with Google Drive. The shop uses Google Drive to transfer files between computers, such as from my own to the Laser Cutter computer, but it’s always slow and after editing a file, it takes a long time for the changes to sync.
I ended up building a server out of a Thinkpad running an instance of the adevur/easy-samba Docker container. It allows for instantaneous file transfers and can be used for other services as well, should the Shop require them.
My big accomplishment for this week was finally getting my Micromouse running! It’s still a long way from being done, but all the parts are together and now the main thing it needs is some tuning. At the moment, it’s capable of navigating a maze, but it’s very inconsistent and it’s movements are quite imprecise. It needs to be baby-sat to keep from crashing into a wall. Some of the problems are due to the bumpy cardboard maze, and I do intend to build a nice wooden one. The maze I’ve been using so far is actually Gabe Araujo’s maze, who is building a normal size Micromouse.
The only information the robot is given in order to traverse a maze is:
- Starting coordinates
- Starting orientation
- Goal coordinates
- Cell size
- Maze dimensions
Everything else is learned during runtime using the onboard sensors.
Yes I know that it keeps turning in the wrong direction, I intend to fix that.