This week, our team has spent a great amount of time working on finalizing the details for our first components ordering. While we worked on this, we realized some potential risks that could be more dangerous to our deliverables. This includes mostly the assembly of the physical board + eraser + wheel + rail + RPi. We need to ensure that the following aspects don’t fail:
- the power source should have enough voltage to support the motor, linear actuator, and RPi.
- the components aren’t too heavy to make the board not balanced.
- the communication between PRi and our web server should be generalized, and this part is the one that we haven’t addressed enough in our meeting this week and we decide to worry about the hardware parts for now and invest more time on RPi and web server integration after fall break based on our schedule.
For the first two components, we’ve searched for potential physical components that could give enough voltage while has a light weight. And we’ve successfully found the components and added it to our budget list. However, the rail we decided to spend some time exploring the 3D printing options as there isn’t a rail online that fits well to the wheel we found. Besides this, we currently don’t have major changes in our system spec. Due to the change, there is a slight decrease in our cost, but we will still need to check if we need to spend any money on the 3D printing.
Since the change is in system spec instead of how we design the process, there is no update on the schedule. Below is our current budget form.
To answer this week’s question, we’ve applied the following principles of engineering, science, and mathematics:
- during the solution formulation, we prioritized the approach that gives the most general capability while being of great familiarity to most group members. Therefore, we’ve utilized our knowledge in software engineering so that we could use the Django framework to manage the backend of our web app with access to relational DB that stores relevant information about the student’s “voting” mechanism in our project.
- We’ve also considered various types of motors and control systems with our background in embedded system engineering and decided to use stepper motors to have better control over the precision of movement.
- We also applied our knowledge in electrical engineering to come up with potential solutions to wire the components together so that we could reduce the cost of power sources by buying fewer batteries while supplying the voltage to more components.