Since moving to Virginia, I have been attending Fairfax Community Church. My pastor was discussing raising a child, and showing them how to have a relationship with Christ as the last part of the “Rules of Engagement” series. He talked about in interesting statistic:
- A child has a 72% chance of being active in faith as an adult if the father and mother are both active in their faith.
- A child has a 55% chance of being active in faith as an adult if the father is active in his faith, but not the mother.
- A child has a 15% chance of being active in faith as an adult if the mother is active in her faith, but not the father.
- A child has a 6% chance of being active in faith as an adult if neither parent is active in their faith.
This is very interesting given that today is Father’s Day. It’s a reminder to all of the fathers out there (and those of us that want to be fathers some day) that your faith is the first step to helping your child toward the same goal. However, ultimately it is the child’s responsibility to shape his/her future.
So, I bought a 2008 Nissan Sentra 2.0S yesterday, and I am already loving it! Tomorrow will be the first long trip as I go to Virginia to meet the movers. I can’t wait to get it onto the highway …
It has been about a month since I released an update on our senior design robot, so here it goes. The goal of this robot is to autonomously collect three ping-pong balls and place them in a repository in the corner, or through a randomly placed hole in the center of the board. We are using another Freescale microcontroller for this located on the top of the robot, although this one has a little more power. The robot is running off of two packs of five 1.2V NiMH batteries, and the power board I designed is the brown board in the center. This board contains voltage regulators for the sensors and optoisolators for motor control. (Optoisolators use a photodetector to isolate the motors from the rest of the system so that noise is not introduced to the sensors or microcontroller.)
In terms of sensors, each wheel has an optical wheel encoder, which are used to keep track of how far the wheels have turned. This allows the robot to make smart turns. In addition, there are four range infrared sensors on the robot, a long range on the top front for detecting walls (GP2Y0A), a short range on the bottom front for detecting balls (GP2D120), and two short range on the right side for wall crawling (also GP2D120). The wall crawling infrared sensors are used so that we can follow a wall using Proportional-Integral-Derivative control.
Lastly, a digital compass is placed on the microcontroller board, which allows the robot to turn toward the four cardinal directions with acceptable accuracy. We also recently added the spoon claw pick-up mechanism that can pick up balls on the ground and the one on top of the quarter roll. The only thing we have left to do is add some type of break beam sensor to the bottom spoons of the claw to verify that we have picked up a ball.