You're sending signals

This past week was chock full of successes on the electronics side of the project. We were finally able to get the motor controllers to work properly after many hours of playing with the loop gain and current limit adjustments and making sure we were operating in the proper mode. We can now precisely enforce the motor velocity with a control signal from our processor board.

We were also able to get the processor to communicate with a laptop using the radio modem and a serial connection. We then got a Java GUI rigged up that was able to send characters to the serial port and communicate with the processor. Bottom line, we can drive the robot by remote control over 10km away....once we have a robot.

Mike's been having a tremendously difficult time getting the GPS to work. The company tech support doesn't even know what kind of connectors are used to connect the board to anything else, so he had to rig up a custom adapter. We can't see any signals coming through the serial port, so right now we're scrambling to get that to work, otherwise we're dead in the water. Hopefully Novatel will return our calls at some point....