Jiaqi Zou’s Status Report: Week 7

• Tying loose ends together
• Tentative mock presentation

• Group Reading session
• Cross Read other members’ section

• ID Design in Solidworks
• Designing the container case
• Mechanical Mechanism

Initial Assembly With Assembled Parts in SolidWorks

For the mechanical design, we have thought of the following ways around the problem with wiring around a rotatable base. The IR circuit and camera are mounted on the body of the IR Man through wires. The camera, in particular, is connected through FPC cable, which is not twistable at all. The first step into solving this is to have our RPi sit on the same platform as IR Man figurine so that the IR Circuit and the Camera should stay in place with respect to relative position. Now the problem is how to go about the wiring interface between our RPi and the Nema stepper Motor that is not rotating with the RPi. We came up with the following approaches.

1. Have the Nema Motor sit upside down. In this way, the base of the motor is attached to the rotatable chassis and wires between RPi and Motor would no longer be a problem. (This would require Software changes and extra control algorithms to ensure accuracy)
2. Using a gear train to make the shaft spin off-centered from the round chasis and use a slip ring in the center of the chassis to solve cable entanglement issues.
3.  Use an extra nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz transceiver module to enable wireless communication between an RPi and Arduino. While the RPi is spinning on the chassis with IR Man, it sends the command to an Arduino that drives the Nema Stepper Motor and not spinning. Since cables are eliminated, the problem is solved. (Extra Hardware Components. Complicated Wireless Communication with added latency. A separated software stack to be added that adds significant complexity to the system.)

We will be discussing the above approaches in greater detail during our weekly meeting.

Deliverables Next Week

1. Continues Implementing Hardware / Electrical Portion

• Start making IR Circuit more scalable and test on actual devices
• Start exploring the IR database and have a deeper understanding of the signal structure
• Start programming the Stepper Motor and start thinking about the motion planning algorithm

2. Continue ID and Mechanical Design of the IR Man

• Start designing the industrial design of the IR Man
• Capture some of the mechanical structures on CAD

3. Finish Writing and Polishing Design Document

• Do revision on any changed parts or adding information after two weeks of development
• Polishing the document and finish parts
• Cut redundant materials