NATCAR

For the past two years, I've working on a project that took a ton of time. For this I've been skipping events and parties. Now we've built one car and competed in last year's competition, I decided to move on and leave it to the younglings. Many people have been wondering why I would skip all those fun stuff for something like this, so I feel that I should kinda explain what NATCAR is about.

NATCAR is an automatic car that can detect the track and run it. The track is pretty much white tape on black carpet. There's also a wire that contains 75 kHz current running through it. That's pretty much the basic setup of the track.

The car has to be able to detect the track, whether by detect the color contrast or the current, and run the track with the fastest time while trying to avoid wandering off the track (hitting the white cones, which gives penalty). Of course, the car that takes the shortest time wins.

The car itself contains several parts. Although there's not so much limit of how you make the car, it does have to have some basic parts. There are the sensors in the front, which senses the track; there's also the motor controller that controls the speed the revolution of the motor; the micro-controller that acts as the brain of this car. Yep! Things like these.

A Nice View of One of the Sensor

Honestly, the components are not very hard to build, but they are extremely hard to calibrate. Things usually work well on their own, but it would be a totally different story once we assemble them altogether. For most of the time, our effort was on debugging. This includes tons of testing and reverse engineering.

The Micro-Controller

Every week, we sacrificed our precious rest time for this project. Our meetings were usually on Saturdays from 10 am to 2 pm, but very often (almost every week) we worked until night time. Yes, our Saturdays are gone. Of course we complained about this a lot (you have no idea how much I complained :) ), but, o well, we gotta do as much as possible so we could make it to the competition.

A View of Soldering

I have to say that we had a lot of fun (someone: ewwwww) from doing this. Although it sounds and looks and in every single possible way very nerdy, we still had fun :) . We got to put what we learned in classes in practice. However, whatever we learned in classes can only apply a little bit. For most of the time, it was more like trial and error with probable hypotheses. I believe we learned more from this than from any class.

Our Lovely Testing Machines

There are not only engineering stuff involved in this project. For a while we had to deal with the funds. In this period of time, we hit a bottleneck and had no solution for a good month or so, and the board saw it and thought that we couldn't finish the car on time. Thanks to some board members and our team's hard effort, we still got to finish the car on time (HA! Screw you, board!) Although the result of the competition is not satisfying (we did not finish the race), the process is still awesome.

Now that I'm done, I wish the best luck to all who are still on the team. I will go back sometimes just to check out how everyone does. Many members who were on the team are still on the team this year, so I'm pretty sure they will have some nice breakthrough. Good luck again to all of you NATCAR-er. May the force be with you :p

The Car (okay...this one is not the one we built. i dont have a picture of our car. this belongs to the team two years ago...XD)