This week, we placed an order for our parts early this week but unfortunately did not receive any of them yet. As a result, I spent time preemptively investigating software aspects of our hardware.
For the claw, I tested controlling a servo through the PWM output on an Arduino board. Although we intend to put them on the Jetson board directly, I tested with the Arduino since I didn’t have access to the Jetson this week. I found that it was very straightforward to run a servo on the Arduino, so we should strongly consider running it there instead of the Jetson if possible.
I also looked into the encoders on the motors and found that they were incremental encoders that have a channel A and channel B pin that needs to be connected to digital pins. In order to keep count of the encoder, we need to compare the signal of the channels with each other as they are out of phase. This also means that we need 5 pins for each motor that uses the encoder – 3 for the motor and 2 for the encoder. As a result, we will likely need to use 3 Arduinos as opposed to our current plan of 2. Overall, using our encoders should not be too difficult as long as we can properly read the pins.