Completing Homework 2: Both group meetings

So for our first group meeting, my entire group got together and for the first 10 to 15 minutes and made sure we were all on the same page of what we wanted to do for our project and how is was going to work. We decided to scrap our original idea completely and go with a ball socket idea where two servos were taped together and acted like a joint to cover the x-axis and y-axis, so that no matter were the light was, our design could follow it. We decided to build a triangular face to put the LDRs on and did one in each corner of the equilateral triangle. We soldered longer wires onto the LDRs so that the LDRs could be punched through the cardboard face and far away from the arduino and other circuits. Then, we attached the base of our project to the servo motors and then the servo motors to a box that contained all of the wires and circuits. We were having trouble getting our project to work, it would basically shake back and forth, like it was "seizing". We decided, for simplicity, to used two arduino boards and connect one LDR to one board and the other two to the other board. However, the system was still having problems and would not work properly, but would for a pattern in it's movement. We played around with the program multiple times, trying the most basic code, like the one showed in class, to complicated editions to that code to try to fix our problem, but nothing was working. So, we decided to call it a day and come back to our project the next day. The picture below just shows how much "fun" my group was having trying to get our project to work!


The first solution we tried at our next meeting was to add another LDR in the "middle" of our face. However, we still were getting a repeating patter from the motors that did not follow the light. After playing with every LDR to make sure they worked, all the motors and circuits, and the codes themselves, we realized that we had written our code to work with the computer by transferring values back and forth from the arduino to the computer and vice versa. The problem was that we forgot this when we were trying to get our machine to work and were unplugging both arduinos from the computer and just using the external plugs for power. So, once we used both the computer and the external power source, our project worked perfectly! Me and another team member stayed a little late after that meeting to try to put lights on our face but had no luck, seeing as it was extremely late and we no longer had the patience to work on it. We did, however, make the LDRs more centered in the middle of the face and closer together. We now were using four LDRs in the center of the face (like a diamond) where the top and bottom LDRs caused y-axis movement, while the left and right LDRs cause x-axis movement. Our project apparently (had to miss the demistration due to another class) worked extremely well and we were all decently happy with our final design. Though, if we had figured out our issues with our system earlier, we would have tried to make it more flashy by adding lights or etc. Below is a picture of our final project.