We were so inspired by ArcField’s cubesat, but we did not have the resources to launch a cubesat within the 36 hours of this competition. Instead, we have the next best thing, a rover! This rover is equipped with a temperature, light, and ultrasonic-distance sensor. It also has an inertial measurement unit for tracking its acceleration and rotation. The brain of all these devices is the Arduino UNO, which we programmed using Arduino IDE. The output of these sensors is encoded into a one-line string by the Arduino, which is sent over serial connection to our laptop. That string of data is then processed by a Python script running on our laptop to display some beautiful graphs of data.
Building this rover was an arduous process. The Mason Innovation Exchange had a prebuilt drivetrain which they allowed us to use for our project, but that drivetrain had structural issues we had to fix in order for the it to drive straight. Afterwards, we spent a lot of time deliberating over how to get all the sensors onto the robot and may have destroyed an IMU (don't tell anyone). Initially we tried to get a prototype shield on the robot, but in the end, we used a pretty hacky method of a breadboard with sensors.
After we got the robot built, the real challenge began. We had to write some tricky Arduino code to get the all the sensor readings onto one line of serial output per tick. And then we had the challenge of displaying that data on our laptop. In order to do this, we utilized several python libraries. We used SerialPy to read the serial input from our Arduino and then we used Streamlit to display the data in real time. After realizing the difference between an unsigned and signed integer and purchasing a new IMU from Microcenter, we were able to successfully display the data!
In the future, we could utilize serial monitor over Bluetooth through a chip that's already present in the Arduino UNO to send data to our interface instead of relying on the USB cable. Once wireless, our project becomes a simple reconnaissance machine, returning to the original technology of the satellite ArcCube that inspired this project. We also wish to display the sensor data in a better format with a more robust dashboard.
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