Our parts finally arrived this week, so I spent the week building. Unfortunately, I was unable to work in-person for Wednesday and Thursday due to a potential COVID exposure. Hence, most of my work took place on Monday, Friday and Saturday.
I was able to complete building the mechanical aspect of the linear slide system (not including mounting). We did not integrate yet because we ran out of nuts for building but will receive more by tomorrow. The slides seem to extend fairly well although they were getting slightly stuck at times. I think this could easily be fixed with a bit of lubricant. The length of a single slide is 1/3 meter (full meter extrusion cut into thirds), and each set of slides is a mirror of the other.
I also investigated the motor shields with Ludi and was able to control a motor so that it spins at a specified frequency of a specified amount of time, holds, and spins in the opposite direction the same way. This should be approximately the operation we need for the linear slides.
Finally, I attempted to get the claw working with the Arduino code written last week but found that the servo required a voltage of around 6-8V to operate. We will likely need to get a buck convertor to use the claw’s servo.