embarrassing

Yesterday, I went to school to do more testing with the wheelchair.  I had made enough adjustments with the biosignals controller to feel comfortable to move into incorporating the vision controller.  Well, I did my usual routine.  Unplug the wheelchair from the charger, turn on its electric motor, turn on its computer, turn on its touchscreen, and go turn on the computer in the lab while I wait for the wheelchair computer to boot up.  A few minutes pass, and I go back to the wheelchair, I log in, put on the biosignal sensors, and run my program to control the wheelchair.  I set the switch that toggles between joystick and pc control to pc control, and start making the gesture to go forward.  Nothing happens even though the program is telling me that it's sending a forward command.  I clean the build, rebuild and run again.  Nothing.  I switch to joystick control, and try to move.  Nothing.  This is when I start worrying.  I power cycle the wheelchair, and nothing happens.  I start freaking out and the lab supervisor is not there to help. 

Did I break the wheelchair?  Did I burn the motor?  Did I kill its battery?  I didn't know.  I waited a few hours for the lab supervisor to come in, but it was raining a lot and he is a motorcycle rider so I knew he wasn't coming in.  So I sent an email to the supervisor and went home defeated.

Today, I go in.  I try again, in denial of what had happened the day before.  Nothing happens.  An hour passes and the lab supervisor finally comes in.  He goes to check the wheelchair and he exclaims 'Oh I see....I think it's pretty obvious what is happening here.....why don't you come see?'  So I went to the robot arena and he tells me there's this lever that disables the electric motor so you can push the wheelchair manually.  He turns the lever and the wheelchair can now be moved by the joystick.  Yup, pretty embarrassing.  Oh well, at least I got some valuable testing done today.