This week our team moved much closer to having our gantry fully functional. We had a few challenges with the laser cut parts not matching the 3D printed parts in size. To fix this, we have started printing new parts to replaced the laser cut pieces. Our next big challenge will be integrating our software pipeline into the gantry. We will build each software piece separately and bring them together to function automatically. We plan on starting integration well in advance of the interim demo, so we should have plenty of time to fix any issues that crop up. In the event the automatic pipeline fails, we should still be able to manually activate our scripts and have the gantry fully functional for the demo.
With the issues that cropped up in building the gantry, we’re slightly behind schedule. However, not spending time on construction gave us more time to work on our software, so we should be able to get back on track easily.
Our design has slightly changed. Before, we were planning on using a wagon as the base for our system. However, we discovered that our motors would not be able to move the heavy wagon base. Instead, we are leaning more towards using a personal grocery cart as the base because it’s much lighter and should still allow us to move as expected.
