Category: Xiaoyu’s Weekly Reports

This week, our team worked together and integrated the whole system, ensuring all communications between different components are working correctly. We now have achieved our MVP. We also spent some time doing user testing and other tests. We also completed the final poster and are starting to write the final report.

We are currently on schedule. Before the final demo, we will finish our last tests on cleanness and latency of erasing. After that, we will also be finishing up the final video and final report.

This week, my teammates and I worked together and finished assembling the system. We tested the erasing functionality and decided the best distance and pressure for the slider rails. Also, we ordered a new type of motor driver, drv8825, in our attempts to boost the motor’s max speed. It turns out to work pretty well, doubling the speed of the motor. Our team also worked on the final presentation and a short demo video together. Here is a picture of our fully assembled system.

Currently we are on schedule. Next week, we plan to finish overall testing of the entire system, as well as the final poster, video and report.

This week, Jiayi and I are working on communication between RPi and web application. We followed guidance from the internet and wrote some code. Currently it is not working, but we will work on it tomorrow to fix it. Also, as a team, we ordered wood pieces and started to assemble parts together, Now we assembled supporting structure of whiteboard, whiteboard itself and upper slider rail together, and we have concrete plans for the rest of the system.

Currently we are mostly on schedule. However, due to shipping error, we received a new motor that does not fit into our system. Considering we don’t have much time left, in order to stay on schedule, we decided to first build the system with the old motor, which is slower than we expected. Aside from that, our progress meet our schedule.

Our deliverables will be to finish communication between website and RPi and assembling mechanical system tomorrow, and spend some time before or after Thanksgiving to test the entire system.

Attached is some code for RPi-webapp communication that we are still working on.

This week the motors arrived and I have successfully tested my  motor control code from last week. I also did current limiting on motor driver and now the motor can spin in both directions for different speed and distance. I also spend time writing accelerate function of motor, which allows it to gradually accelerate to a bigger maximum speed. Attached is a photo of the motor.

My progress is on schedule this week. Next week we plan to finish communication between RPI and website. Our team also ordered some wood, and are planning to assemble the physical component on the whiteboard next week.

For the motor part, I have already performed unit tests on functionality and latency. Currently, the motor is functional, but latency test performance is not satisfying, because the screw rod is very inefficient in transferring  rotation to horizontal movement. We ordered some new rods that are 4x more efficient, and will perform further latency tests later this week.

We are also planning to do some usability tests after we complete building and integrating the system. We will recruit participants and ask them to try out our website’s different functionalities, and ask for their feedback. We will also test latency in camera and projectors, as well as power requirement for RPI and motor.

This week I was working on controlling the stepper motor with Raspberry Pi. I spent quite some time learning to boot the RPi for the first time. I had some trouble with the micro SD card but managed to resolve that. After successfully boot the Rpi and access it through SSH, I also started testing my code written last week with some simple circuitry. I don’t have the power supply needed for the motor to spin, but I visualized the input and outputs to the motor driver with LEDs and they look fine now. Attached are pictures of the RPi.

Although last week my schedule was behind, this week I am gradually catching up. I still need to put in some effort in the next few days to make the motor spin, by connecting it to a power supply and (maybe) further debugging. Also, our non-captive stepper motor should be on the way, so our team can start assembling things on the whiteboard next week.

In the past week, our team further modified the eraser moving mechanism.  . I spend some time online researching about different types of stepper motor with rods and we decided to switch to non-captive stepper motors for our design. I looked for appropriate motors and screw rods and we made some new orders and are now waiting for things to arrive. Personally, I have now write some simple Rpi code to control the movement of the motor through motor driver for unit testing. Below is a screenshot of some code

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Due to delays of shipping and changes of design, our team might not be on schedule in terms of the physical part of our design. We are trying to make this up by working on the code portion of our design. We will also devote more time once our orders arrive.

Next week, our schedule heavily depends on when things arrive. We are planning to start building out system on whiteboard. Personally, I will be  integrating the unit code I wrote into the whole design system. I will also be setting up Rpi and start unit testing the functionality of motor.

These two weeks we basically worked on writing the design report. Based on feedback and discussion with professors, we decided to rewrite our use case. Also, we added a lot more design details about how we would connect each components physically. We ended up ordering many new components for the project. Personally, I am staring to set up Raspberry Pi and wrote some pseudo code. I now have some overall idea about how my code would look like, but I still need to learn how to send correct signals to stepper motor drive. Below is a screenshot of part of the pseudo code. 

Due to changes in our design, we ended up ordering some new components during mid-semester break, which might arrive later than expected. Some of my code would need to depend on the components, so my schedule might be behind. However, I am planning to start writing code about whatever I have now, and spend some extra time fixing everything once our new orders arrive.

Next week, after the components arrive, our team will be spending much time on physically building the system and adjusting it. Personally, I will also continue to write motor and solenoid control code.

In response to the weekly question, I am learning to use Raspberry Pi for this project. I’ve had previous experience with Arduino and Nucleo microcontrollers, so I expect that learning to use RPi would not be too difficult. Another thing that I need to learn is to use stepper motor driver, which might differ from regular DC motor drivers that I used before.

 

 

This week I gave the design presentation on Wednesday.As a inexperienced presenter, I spent much time preparing for it. Although the presentation did not go very smoothly, but I give it my best try. We just received feedback from Task today and I am considering them as we prepare our design report. Our team also finished submitting all our order forms and now we are just waiting for things to arrive.

My progress is currently on schedule. Recent weeks I am waiting for components to arrive and have less work planned on schedule. Next week I will be starting to write RPi code for motors and solenoids. My plan is to have some compilable code before the components arrive.  Also, I will be working with my group members on our design report next week.

 

This week our group is working on several things: revising our use case, making component orders and making the design proposal. Our group had some in depth discussion about the use case of our project, after receiving many feedbacks from TAs and professors. Personally, I also spend some time looking for appropriate hardware components that would fit our project, and I am ready to justify my choices in the design proposal. I have also received RPi borrowed from ECE Inventory, and is starting to learn how to use it.

Next week, I will be giving the design presentation. Our group will be revising our design after we receives feedbacks, and will be writing the design report together. I also plan to spend some time getting familiar with RPi, which we already borrowed from ECE Inventory.

In response to the discussion, I think 18-349 Intro to Embedded Systems is particularly helpful to this project. In that course I did a project that can rotate a motor to a certain position using PID control, which is related to how we plan to move the erasers across the board in this project. Also, the skills I learned when I work on learning how to use the Nucleo board from scratch would definitely help me setting up Raspberry Pi for this project.

This week our group is working together on the proposal presentation. We prepared the presentation slides together. After the presentation we also spend some time considering and discussing the feedbacks and questions we get after the presentation. We decided that our proposal is mostly reasonable and does not need major changes, and spend some time on the details of our designs.

We also spend some time on preparing the list of components we need to order. As I have taken Embedded Systems, I was looking for stepper motor. After discussing with our team, we have also decided to replace the robot arm with solenoids, as they both serve the same functions but solenoids are much simpler.  I spent some time reading data sheet and looking up information about solenoid online before making the decision. Here is a link to our list of components:

Currently our group is on schedule.

Next week, we plan to get components ordered by Wednesday. Our team will also be working on the design presentation throughout the week.