Last Sunday, I worked with the team to finish up the design presentation and spent a few hours for presenting it. I ended up presenting on Monday and learned a lot from other groups’ presentations.
Throughout the week, I worked closely with the team to reevaluate and discuss solution ideas. In particular, I helped give feedback to and researched the drivetrain design with Ludi in terms of evaluating motor drivers and compiling an initial bill of materials. After realizing that the motor driver we were initially considering had insufficient current output for our motors, the BTS7960 ended up being the best motor driver solution we could find. We also met up today to thoroughly discuss the hardware solutions we are using and ensured that they synthesized together and had appropriate power systems.
Bill of materials for linear slides + drivetrain:
We also realized that our bill of materials was more costly than anticipated, so we ended up pivoting our linear slides to being powered by Nema 17 stepper motors instead (from the inventory).
Furthermore, I integrated my linear slide system CAD to Ludi’s completed drivetrain CAD (pictured below).
Finally, I have been wrapping up my research for the servo-controlled claw and plan to spend tomorrow CADing it. Most off-the-shelf parts seem to be unfortunately small and I have seen promising claws made from laser cut parts. In particular, I found the following post to be very useful: https://imgur.com/gallery/LpyW3 and the following book chapter: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4302-6838-3_11. The design of such servo claw systems seems to be fairly standardized (claw arms paired by gears and composed of 2 links).