Week 9 was a tough week since were starting to combine some of the codes together. We started by combining the neopixels with the RFID tag, which was proven to be an extremely difficult task. Virginia and Divya had problems in trying to get the RFID tag to work properly with the neopixels. One of the main issues was getting the colours we wanted to output, we were not able to initially get the neopixels to turn off and then turn back on with the RFID tag tap. Virginia realized that we may have to change the code. There were some delays that were messing with the RFID tag response rate. Kimberly kept doing more tests on the transmitter and receiver, through obtaining an even better codes for both of them. She was also in the process of selecting the varying shades of colours for the flower neopixel. Virginia tried to use "cases" but that was proven to be unsuccessful. We then tried going back to using the "old" "if-else" statements codes. Later in the week Virginia found a better starter code and it did work a lot better than the old one. Slowly but surely the logic of colours that we wanted were coming together, except for turning off the neopixels, when trees are chopped.
Vanessa and Divya then tried to get the stepper motors working. The stepper motors were the key to moving our 6ft acrylic rod from 0 to 45 degrees. After trying to connect the stepper motors to a pololu and attaching it to a DC power supply, the pololu started to fume, even before we uploaded the code. So we had to quickly pull out the power supply. We believe that there was a short in the circuit, and maybe that the stepper motors was not soldered properly as it seemed that the wire from the stepper motor was not touching the other side of the prototyping board. We tried many different ways to get the stepper motor to work, like using a motor shield, using different capacitors, and using the L293D, which were all from examples we found online. But somehow it still wouldn't work. Unfortunately, we had to give up on the stepper motor because it was taking too much time and we still couldn't get it to move.
What we have done so far
