This week the pressure was on to make lots of progress on the project. I spent most of the week fabricating the structure for the gantry. On Monday, I planned and cut the parts for the wooden board that will hold the gantry vertically. Then later in the week the entire group built the rest of the structure. This entailed drilling holes and attaching the wheel servo mounts, attaching the wheels via glue and timing belt, and attaching the gantry in place. Then on Saturday I worked on the software pipeline. This is currently our largest bottle neck since a lot of the libraries cannot create optimal svg or gcode. We’ve modified our approach to convert to a .png since it converts using the pixels for better readability, but this means that it will take a lot longer to draw if code is trying to recreate each pixel. I’ve tried multiple approaches including pre-processing using computer vision and post processing using some optimization libraries, none of which I have had much success with. I will look to continue working on this problem as well as make some minor mechanical changes to the system early next week.
After settling on the project idea back in September, I realized that I did not have much experience with any of the technologies that we were going to use for our project. Over the course of the past few months I’ve learned a lot about robotics, machine learning, and mechanics. Specifically, learning more about fabrication (3D printing, laser cutting) and different types of libraries that were relevant to the project. Often this learning was done by talking to people such as the Techspark student workers who were very gracious to give me suggestions on how to turn some of our structural ideas into reality. On the software side, I learned mostly through reading documentation perusing forums and chatrooms to see what approaches others had taken to achieve a similar outcome.