Amber Horvath Spring 4

This week we began working on some more implementation endeavors for the arm's movements. I implemented the touch sensor and deck plate extension and retraction (which were my designated tasks from the Requirements document) as interrupts that execute code upon receiving information from the hardware. In the case of the deck plate, an interrupt will be sent upon a timer event line (part of the RSX rocket) going to LOW and signaling the end of our deployment period for the payload. The interrupt will trigger and power the motor attached to the bottom of the deck plate, change it's direction from outward to inwards, and step the motors to pull the plate in. The code for the touch sensors are signaled by the touch sensors being depressed, and will write a code to the telemetry line signaling that we made contact. The implementation for the touch sensor is in science.c while the retract/extend code is in its own file (retract.c and retract.h). Since this is now complete, I will be assisting Helena in her work to finish the arm pathing and movement. Unrelated to the implementation effort, I joined Sam Lundeen (from the MEs) to visit Garmin regarding doing environmental testing for the arm. We met up with Steve Horvath (my dad!) and Greg Fisher to see whether it was viable to mount our arm onto their vibration table and test how the arm faired in situations similar to what will be experienced at launch time. We are going to meet with our team to update them that this is viable and to determine what we want equipped to the arm during this time. While it would be ideal to have everything attached, we've also had funding issues and don't want to risk losing any motors or other valuable pieces that we may not be able to replace if they get damaged during the testing.

Blockers are that I still have been unable to actually test this code due to the motors and arm being not set up currently. Hopefully I will be able to do this by our (extended, thanks McGrath!) May 15th deadline.

Future plans are to continue implementation efforts with Helena and I also hope to clean up our repository a bit and add some more documentation regarding how to test our code so when we have the code freeze, the TAs/McGrath aren't confused as to what's going on.