Hi, my name is Vivian Trommer, and I am interning at Colorado School of Mines. I am working with Professor Petruska, two of his PhD students, and a master’s student this summer. We are working on making a self-driving, electric race car using an RC car (the Super Baja Rey 2.0). I am staying with my half sister, Shawnee, and her husband, Drew, in Lakewood, Denver.
This week was one of the most challenging and most fun weeks so far! This week I focused on setting up our Raspberry Pi 5 and started to think about the PWM waves of the car. I also got to go home for a few days for the Fourth of July weekend!
On Monday, we got the Raspberry Pi 5 in the mail, so it was my job to get it set up. I spent a few days last week practicing on some other Pis we had, so I felt pretty confident. Unfortunately, when I was setting up the Pi, I made a few stupid mistakes, and it set me back a little bit. I did get to practice some of my coding, which was a really good experience. Once I did get the Pi set up, I ran into more problems. No windows were opening on the Raspberry Pi, so I couldn’t open Firefox or the terminal to code in. I asked Mabel, the master’s student, to help me, and we ended up working on the Pi for the whole day. It kept not working and running extremely slowly. We tried to use different browsers and changed the micro SD card multiple times, but it still would not fully work. When I came back the next day, it was running much smoother due to some work that Mabel had done on it.
The box that the Raspberry Pi 5 came in.
Then we wanted to start connecting the sensors that we are putting on the car to the Raspberry Pi. This is how our program will receive input from the outside world and use it to self-drive. However, when we tried to do this, the Pi was not acknowledging the sensor even though it was plugged in. I let Mabel handle this problem because she is an amazing coder and was doing some very complex things.
I also finished up one of the last pieces of hardware designs left in the project, which was the mount for the Raspberry Pi. We ordered a case to protect the Pi, and then I built a mount to secure the case to the car. It was a very simple design, but it fits perfectly. I did have to drill some holes into the Pi case, but it worked out in the end.
This week, I got to work with PWM waves and measure them. PWM waves are present in electric motors and help control the speed. For our project, we need to know the PWM waves of the car so we can put those measurements into our self-driving program. I used an oscilloscope to measure the PWM waves, and it was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.
The oscilloscope I used
I turned the car on and hooked up the oscilloscope to see what the PWM waves were when the car was going forward, backward, turning left, turning right, etc. I was able to get the measurements for the steering, but I could not figure out how to get them for the throttle. I ended up asking Seth, one of the PhD students, for help. He also couldn’t figure out how to get the measurements without stripping a wire, which we can’t do because the car is technically not fully ours, and we have to return it at the end of the summer. I’m not totally sure what he did, but Seth made some sort of wire contraption that hooked up to the car and the oscilloscope that worked the first time we used it, but when we tried a second time, the throttle system of the car stopped working completely. Seth and I tried lots of things to try and fix it but it seemed like the throttle was completely broken. This happened on the day before I left to go home for the Fourth, so I have not heard if the car is working again or not. Hopefully, we can get it all fixed.
I was also lucky enough this week to be able to go home for the Fourth of July weekend! I had so much fun back home in Telluride, and I got to see all of my friends and family. The parade was awesome, as it is every year, and the drone show in the park was really cool as well.
My sister and I also got to go to a Rockies game, which was so much fun even though I don’t know anything about baseball. We also went to a very delicious Mediterranean restaurant one night for dinner.
Our seats at the Rockies game!
I can’t wait for next week!
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