We have made real progress toward having cars follow our leader car, so decided to add another follower with different sensing. It is exciting seeing the cars communicating and following, although very slowly so for now.
T-shirts were delayed but will come this week.
Greetings from California! I would like to offer our apologies for the relative lack of communication up until this point. We will be sure to keep everyone updated from here on out.
First of all, I would like to direct you all to the blog we were maintaing before we began posting here. The url is www.PVITRobotics.com. We have the general description of the project posted there as well as a few status updates up until this point. Most everything has been going smoothly, but we have encountered a few problems with getting power to all of the components on our cars. Most notable is the issue we are facing with powering our Wi-Fi router on the lead car. It has proven to be quite the little voltage hog. Although the batteries we have are strong enough to get the lights on the router to come on, it is unclear as of yet if we can get it to put out a signal that the other cars can recieve. With luck, we’ll be able to put this problem behind us in the next couple of meetings.
In the beginning we wanted a car that was small and wouldn’t be to hard to maintain. We went to Pacific Coast Hobbies and bought a Traxxas Rustler VXL. We bought a lithium polymer battery 6000mA. The first week we started to test it. The top speed ended up to be around 70mph. We were amazed after a few crashes how weak plastic is at high speeds. We ended up looking into E-maxx monster trucks to use instead. They go a top speed of 20mph and are strong enough to carry our new E-PC.
We are beginning to test the sensors on board the cars, working out kinks with compatibility with the Arduino controller. This could take some time to get right, but it’s a crucial part of the project so we hope to get the sensors fucntioning as soon as possible.
More updates soon to come!
Good luck to everyone in your engineering endeavors 
-Patrick
We have made a lot of progress as of late, however there are still some things that need to be done. We are currently looking at finding a way to have a universal base for our different gadgets; however, this is turning out more difficult than we had originally planned. We are also looking at space storage, with this also proving to be a bit tricky. Currently we are done with our grater design and we are finishing up on our interlocking bowls. In addition, our slicer design is proving to be somewhat difficult. We just found a product already on the market that was not on the market when with initiated our design. This new product is frighteningly similar to ours and it took a lot of the wind out of our sails. We are currently trying to make ours different and we are working to get the kinks out of our designs. Stay tuned for more updates from Ohio.
Well this month has been a very successful month for us. First of all, we were able to have our first video conference with Ellen and our whole class was present. We were especially excited because we have a PATENT PENDING on PAL and we are now able to share our designs, plans and prototype with anyone. We presented to her what we had done so far on our first prototype and shared with her our success in getting a patent attorney to drive four hours to our school so we could have a meeting with him.
The last two weeks were especially busy for us because we had an opportunity to go a mine rescue training in Colorado. On Thursday night we stayed up until three in the morning so that we could finish our prototype. In the morning we took it out to St. Jude Mine on the Colorado Plateau. While there, we were able to test PAL and to show the miners how it works. They were very excited about the idea of having a Power Assisted Litter in the mines and gave us some valuable feedback. The miners were being trained for mine rescue certification. It was valuable to see firsthand what this rigorous process was like. The whole thing was very long and complicated and would be made much simpler by PAL. After the rescuers were finished with their rescue they were exhausted from carrying a person all the way out of the mine. We believe that PAL could solve these problems and make rescue efforts much easier and therefore more effective. The big take-away from the experience besides everyone’s excitement, was that we would have to re-engineer many of our components to be explosion proof. This will take a lot of work. We will put this off until next year and try to get PAL approved by MSHA.
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Now we are in the process of researching quick disconnect systems and we are also beginning work on our second prototype-a gas powered model.