4.5. Planning

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From the course by Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology

Building Arduino robots and devices

135 оценки

Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology

Building Arduino robots and devices

135 оценки

For many years now, people have been improving their tools, studying the forces of nature and bringing them under control, using the energy of the nature to operate their machines. Last century is noted for the creation of machines which can operate other machines. Nowadays the creation of devices that interact with the physical world is available to anyone. Our course consists of a series of practical problems on making things that work independently: they make their own decisions, act, move, communicate with each other and people around, and control other devices. We will demonstrate how to assemble such devices and programme them using the Arduino platform as a basis. After this course, you will be able to create devices that read the data about the external world with a variety of sensors, receive and forward this data to a PC, the Internet and mobile devices, and control indexing and the movement. The creation of such devices will involve design, the study of their components, the assemblage of circuit boards, coding and diagnostics. Along with the creation of the devices themselves, you will perform visualization on a PC, create a web page that will demonstrate one of your devices, and figure out how an FDM 3D-printer is configured and how it functions. Besides those keen on robotics or looking to broaden their horizons and develop their skills, the course will also be useful to anyone facing the task of home and industrial automation, as well as to anyone engaged in industrial design, advertising and art. The course does not require any special knowledge from the participants and is open even to students of upper secondary school. Programming skills and the level of English allowing to read technical documentation would be an advantage, but this is not obligatory. The entire course is dedicated to practice, so the best way for you would be to get hold of some electronics, follow the illustrated examples and experiment on your own. The kits can be purchased here: kits.cyberphysica.ru. Taught by: Alexey Perepelkin, head of Robotics department in the Laboratory of innovative educational technologies at MIPT Taught by: Dmitry Savitsky, researcher in the Laboratory of innovative educational technologies at MIPT

From the lesson

Week 4

After going through Week 4, you will be able to connect your device to a network, plan its creation beforehand , control heavy loads, and power your device correctly.

4.1. Week overview0:50

4.2. Submersible pump2:02

4.3. Field transistor and relay6:40

4.4. Power supply6:47

4.5. Planning6:07

4.6. Think first7:46

4.7. Soil humidity sensor2:16

4.8. Where do web pages come from4:10

4.9. How to transmit data to a network11:35

4.10. How to receive a command from a network8:14

4.11. Finite-state automaton5:13

4.12. WaterMe program basics and switch7:18

4.13. Errors that we often encounter7:03

4.14. The longest sketch so far12:31

4.15. How WaterMe works5:20

Meet the Instructors

Алексей Перепелкин
Руководитель направления развития цифрового творчества
Центр инновационных образовательных технологий МФТИ
Дмитрий Савицкий
Научный сотрудник
Лаборатория инновационных образовательных технологий МФТИ

Let me tell you: one can’t build a robot except for that case when you are just

having fun, learning, experimenting,

adding new details, trying to combine components differently, etc.

There is one important point here: you are not setting any targets and not planning any

specific results.

On the other hand, when you are working on a project and expect to get certain results,

planning is unavoidable.

Some people say, “Let’s begin, and then we shall see what to do next”.

But think for a moment: how are you going to achieve any results when

you don’t have the slightest idea what components you require,

whether there are enough pins on Arduino, for instance,

or whether there’s enough power for your System, etc.

These little things should make you fall to thinking.

Here is one more example: I have recently returned from a camp,

where teenagers were working on their Arduino projects. Even those kids, who had planned their projects beforehand,

faced such difficulties as, for instance,

the lack of space in the body of the device, which made it hard at the debugging stage

to remove Arduino

and upload a new sketch without having to dissemble the device completely.

Naturally, if you perform that many operations,

you spend so much time, and in the end, you don’t have enough of it.

Here comes another example: a student is constructing an excellent Assistant sysadmin – a robot,

which can learn to reproduce the sequence of your claps

and make buzzing sounds of a set range and frequency

when it’s running in the background.

The student has built the body of the device,

realized one mode and then the second one.

However, one day before the actual presentation of the project, the student sees that

the two modes do not correlate with each other, and a new solution has to be found.

Thank god, the solution has been found, but it always happens in such a rush.

There are various approaches to design and planning.

Every organization that specializes in industrial production of equipment and

software has its own methodology and combinations.

In software design, many try to stick to certain approaches, when the

requirements for the final results are specified every so often,

so in the end, the project is realized after being run a multitude of times.

I personally prefer the approach advocated by one of my acquaintances,

chief technical officer in a company which designs and implements

ambitious large-scale hardware and software systems.

This approach presupposes that one would not start implementing

the system in practice,

while there is still no detailed development plan.

The plan should be done in such minute detail, that every researcher would understand

how particular sections run.

Thus, one would not have to waste time on experiments, tests,

research or learning, as everything will have been done beforehand.

These sections correlate thanks to the fact that

all this has been mentioned in the plan.

This company’s experience shows that the planning/design ration is usually

3 to 1, which means that planning

takes 3 times longer than the implementation of the project itself.

Overall, the time consumed to manufacture the product is

substantially lower than in an

alternative situation, when the requirements are specified stage by stage,

and the project is realized while it’s still “raw”.

When it comes to commercial production,

you need to accept the rules and customs which exist in the company.

But for now, while we are still leaning to assemble simple devices,

I would recommend bearing in mind two

principles which exist in the ideology of the above-mentioned company.

The first one is: I believe that one cannot proceed with design unless

the final results of the project have been specified in detail.

In other words, we need to write out how exactly we are going to test our device in order to check

whether or not it performs the actions that it was initially supposed to perform.

If we write out this description, in fact,

we will find it easier to describe in detail smaller components of this device:

the general description will be followed by more a detailed description, until

the device is described so elaborately that it becomes super simple to actually build it.

The second point which needs to be

taken into account is the fact that one should not proceed with design

while there are still some unexplored facts. For instance, we might not know

what solution we are going to take concerning this or that device node, or we might not be sure

how exactly the device works, how to code or power it -

all these details have to do with the operation of different device nodes.

In reality, when I have classes with teenagers in camps, I always promote

the importance of planning, and in the end it always turns out that

those who do the planning, achieve

the desired results faster. Plus, the quality of their device is usually higher.

Let’s imagine what actions WaterMe will be performing and what we will

need to plan these actions.

I will draw it in the form of a diagram, as usual,

but first, we will need to write out the purpose of our project.

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