Founded in September of 2021, the Conservation Robotics and Engineering Club (CREC) aims to bring together students from different stem disciplines to facilitate the creation of innovative, tangible solutions to the California State Channel Islands campus. Currently, our members are pursuing mechatronics, environmental science resource management, physics, biology, and computer science!
New Beginnings!
We were lucky enough to be passed down the LeoRover v. 1.8 from our gracious mentor and CSUCI Mechatronics Alumni, Mishell Beylik. Granted that the rover had been sitting for a while before we received it, and there was a lot of work to be done, this was very exciting for the team.
Although we have encountered many obstacles, our drive to get this thing to work has yet been hindered! Over the course of the Fall 2022 semester, we have been meeting on Wednesdays to find and address these obstacles.
During our first in person meeting of the semester, we acquainted everyone with the bot for the first time. Our first obstacle was the battery; it had been sitting unused for a significant amount of time, making us unable to power it on. In hopes of solving this issue we charged the battery for an extended period of time, and to our luck it worked! This however was just the beginning of our journey.
In our next meeting we were able to power the rover on, however the LED ring around the power button was failing to light up. This was confusing because the raspberry pi lights were on, but nothing else. From there we assumed that the LED itself was damaged beyond repair. None the less we switched our attention to the raspberry pi and Wi-Fi module.
When working properly, the Wi-Fi module should broadcast a network which should be accessible on any phone, tablet, or computer. This unfortunately was not the case for us, and we went on to spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why. We reached out to the company who produces the rover and they referred us to a help lab. It was inferred that the Wi-Fi module might be damaged and that we would have to get a new one.
During on of our meetings, we eventually tried plugging the Wi-Fi module into a PC. By the grace of God we were able to identify the network and connect to it…under one circumstance. Because we hold our meetings on campus and the school’s network is private, we are prompted with our CI login when attempting to access any network. This means that in order to access the network from the Wi-Fi module, we had to login through the CSUCI portal. We hypothesize that when plugged into the raspberry pi, the network becomes unavailable possible because it’s being blocked by the CI network, and the rover itself does not have a student account. (We got a giggle out of that.)
