Recent things
Been working on my research platform as well as a few other things recently. I'll tell you what, I'm about ready to pull my hair out.
Here's a few videos of how it's supposed to work: http://www.youtube.com/user/MASnetPlatform
For some unknown reason the platform has recently developed a problem in which the identifying circle lags quite far behind the robot's actual position. It started working correctly for a couple of days around Monday this week-- today when we tried to do some tests on it to replicate past experiments, it was right back to lagging, and we have no idea why. I was so excited when it started working correctly again, but unfortunately now that it's back to having problems I don't know how to fix it. And this is after spending a month trying to debug it.
Next step: try to put the system on a new machine because the old one is, quite frankly, crap in a bucket. If even that nice. Maybe more like smeared all over your car. The USB portion of the motherboard (I assume it was originally embedded on the motherboard) got fried at some point in the past, so the new card that's put in there functions, most of the time. The rest of the time it just doesn't cooperate at all. We've also recently started getting random BSODs after a restart (Blue Screen Of Death, for those not acquainted with the acronym), indicating that there is some other more sinister hardware problem underlying our present difficulties. My guess is bad RAM, but that's not exactly easy to debug. The next step is to try to get the system set up on another computer and see if it runs that way. At that point, we'll know if it's the computer causing the problems or at least be able to eliminate that variable.
So maybe the aforementioned nuclear missile analogy is more fitting now.
Well, I can't remember what else I was going to say, so I guess I'll finish here for now.
Here's a few videos of how it's supposed to work: http://www.youtube.com/user/MASnetPlatform
For some unknown reason the platform has recently developed a problem in which the identifying circle lags quite far behind the robot's actual position. It started working correctly for a couple of days around Monday this week-- today when we tried to do some tests on it to replicate past experiments, it was right back to lagging, and we have no idea why. I was so excited when it started working correctly again, but unfortunately now that it's back to having problems I don't know how to fix it. And this is after spending a month trying to debug it.
Next step: try to put the system on a new machine because the old one is, quite frankly, crap in a bucket. If even that nice. Maybe more like smeared all over your car. The USB portion of the motherboard (I assume it was originally embedded on the motherboard) got fried at some point in the past, so the new card that's put in there functions, most of the time. The rest of the time it just doesn't cooperate at all. We've also recently started getting random BSODs after a restart (Blue Screen Of Death, for those not acquainted with the acronym), indicating that there is some other more sinister hardware problem underlying our present difficulties. My guess is bad RAM, but that's not exactly easy to debug. The next step is to try to get the system set up on another computer and see if it runs that way. At that point, we'll know if it's the computer causing the problems or at least be able to eliminate that variable.
So maybe the aforementioned nuclear missile analogy is more fitting now.
Well, I can't remember what else I was going to say, so I guess I'll finish here for now.