Meeting 11

Short meeting today just to check on progress and assign tasks. Our next meeting will not be for a few weeks, as it is the Easter break and Frank is organising the AISB conference.

Due to the break, I have been at my parents house and not had much time to dedicate to project work. I have cleaned up the variable torque code by passing a floating point value rather than an integer. This has the effect of doubling or halving the torque value by simple multiplication instead of the round-about method I originally implemented.

I have the following tasks to complete as soon as possible.

• Clean-up of the schema library Import/Export code

The main issue is that Schemas which have been manually added or imported from a file cause an exception when executed. This is priority 1 for now.

It would be nice (but not essential) to export the schema library as XML. I have used a nice tag generation library in personal projects, but there might be a simpler way. The SAX and DOM parsers are probably worth looking at.

• Specify the block position through the GUI

As my learning task now only requires one "interesting" object, I would like to add a GUI feature which would let the user position the block manually. Most likely through the use of co-ordinates.

In addition to the above, there is also basic error-handling to be implemented in most cases.

These features don't really affect the learning simulation, but will allow me to show some success during the software demonstration in a few weeks time.

Meeting 10

Finished adding the mechanism to allow strong and weak arm movements. Currently, the torque to be applied to a movement is calculated by a method in the UpperArm and LowerArm classes. I have modified each class to apply a multiplier to the torque value before executing the movement. The multiplier is specified by an integer value in a Response object, which is attached to a Schema as normal. This could do with being cleaned up a little, but will have to wait until I have more time.

We also discussed a new file format for the schema library. This is primarily to include new aspects of the Schema class, but will hopefully provide an opportunity to fix the schema importing issue that has been bugging me for weeks! Frank suggested a new comma-separated values approach, whereas I would prefer to go with XML. The CSV format is easier to read manually, but I believe XML would be easier to parse inside the program.

Either way, I want to get these issues dealt with as soon as possible as I am now behind schedule as far as the project plan is concerned. I aimed to have the coding finished by the end of this week to leave me free to concentrate on the report. That will now have to wait.