Ghost Car
At the beginning of my first semester of my Mechanical Engineering Bachelors degree each student had to choose a project as their bachelor project. This project pushed us to work in small teams and get to know more people from our major. The project I chose was the Ghost Car Carrera Bahn. For those who don’t know a Carrera Bahn is a small track with toy cars where the player has control of the cars through a remote plugged into the track. With this control the player is able to control the speed of the car. The overall goal of this project was to have autonomous control of a Carrera car.
To gain autonomous control we coded a program that was picked up by five sensors placed underneath the track. A magnet, which picked up the signal sent through the sensors, was glued to the bottom of our car and we were thus able to control the speed of the car with our Laptop. The language our code was written in was C. Due to this language being new to most of us we were given small tasks to code first and were then able to use these commands in our end product.
To gain autonomous control we coded a program that was picked up by five sensors placed underneath the track. A magnet, which picked up the signal sent through the sensors, was glued to the bottom of our car and we were thus able to control the speed of the car with our Laptop. The language our code was written in was C. Due to this language being new to most of us we were given small tasks to code first and were then able to use these commands in our end product.
Reflection:
As this was one of the only projects I had during my first semester I found it extremely helpful in getting to know more people. During my first semester we were around 350 students so being split into smaller groups gave each of us the opportunity to get to know a smaller amount of people more closely. Our biggest issue during this project was finding the ideal speed for the looping and turn directly after the looping. After trying a few different speeds we found one that worked and stuck with it as all other speeds seemed to create issues.
As this was one of the only projects I had during my first semester I found it extremely helpful in getting to know more people. During my first semester we were around 350 students so being split into smaller groups gave each of us the opportunity to get to know a smaller amount of people more closely. Our biggest issue during this project was finding the ideal speed for the looping and turn directly after the looping. After trying a few different speeds we found one that worked and stuck with it as all other speeds seemed to create issues.