So for last week right, I was primarily working on a couple of design challenge. What I have observed is that there are similarities in hardware and software engineering. The similarity is that there are challenges along the way to finish a project, and sometimes when we see a challenge I have to find ways to pass the challenge. In software, it might be switching to different APIs, different library vendors etc. Sometimes one function call provided by one party works, and the others don’t, and often we don’t know why(probably we didn’t understand the input well enough, the output well enough, and the overall function well enough. A lot the times this happens in math as well, when we don’t know the exact size and dimension and type of a variable, and we don’t know the meaning of certain symbol, the abstract and geometric meaning, and we don’t understand it well enough it often leads us to misuse it, forgetting to use it, not understanding the derivations, etc.
So what I learned last week is that in hardware, we also need to have some basic understanding in the laws of physics and the properties of the materials. I think last week most of the knowledge domain I utitlized was from Physics I, Newtonian physics, in terms of friction, surface area, torque. Some basics application of physics(not numerial, but some high level concepts).
Anyways, I get the belt working at half of the length. Now the problem is our design is not able to carry a lot of the weight because we have hollow areas on the belt, but since this is a proof of concept we will just put light weight stuffs on. For next week I plan to focus on raspberry pi. We are on schedule.