Category: Weekly Status Reports

Andrew’s Status Report for 11/15

I started this week by preparing for the interim demo. With the team, I finished setting up the gantry and organized my talking points for my portion of the presentation. I think the demo went pretty well. It showed our gantry’s drawing capabilities.

Later in the week, the components we ordered arrived. I worked with Ethan to successfully extend the gantry using the 1200 mm rods. Now the vertical length of the white board can be covered. This completed the design change we had discussed. We are now shifting toward prioritizing horizontal movement while still supporting vertical operation. After installing the longer rods, I helped test the prefabricated cart. I helped brainstorm some ways to attach the gantry and came to the conclusion that attaching the gantry to a metal sheet with bolts will ensure that it is secure. One concern we had was whether our motors would be strong enough to rotate the gantry vertically, but testing it relieved that concern.

Next week, I plan to help mount the gantry onto the cart as well as attaching the new stepper motors to the wheel axis. Once the structure is complete, we will begin testing the wheel mobility.

Team Status Report for 11/15

This week saw us begin to implement some of the last minute design changes to our project. Firstly, the team was able to place orders for the structural materials as well as the new rods for the increased gantry length. In the back half of the week we were able to modify our gantry which allowed us to strategize how we wanted to attach the new, longer gantry to the prefabricated cart. Our current idea is to have a large piece of sheet metal that runs along the inside edge of the cart of the same height as the gantry. This piece of sheet metal will secure bolts which are fastened to the gantry to mitigate movement and vibrations. The sheet metal which is above the top of the cart will be supported by metal beams to ensure it stays upright. We plan to get an expert opinion on this structure from Ed at Techspark who may help in fabricating our design.

Additionally, we have made progress on the software pipeline. During the interim demo we had issues with the svg to gcode conversion. We have root caused the issue and have determined that the pdf to svg conversion is not always consistent between different pdfs. For example, the svg for images and text differs and our gcode conversion only currently works for some svg for images. Debugging this has been a work in progress and we are debating pivoting to other file types or trying to modify the pdf such as compressing it before converting it to svg. As the final deadline approaches the group may have to pivot to only having functionality for certain hand-selected files.

Finally, one of the comments we received from the teaching staff revolved around the speed of which the gantry draws. Currently small images can take substantial periods (4+ minutes). We look to remedy this by converting many “arc” drawing types to more “line” drawing types to increase the speed. This will have to get implemented after the svg to gcode is functioning on a more consistent basis.

Verification methods for subsystems are below:

  • Website PDF to SVG: Upload PDFs with a variety of text, images, or both and view SVG output to determine effectiveness
  • SVG to Gcode: Take a variety of SVG files and determine the Gcode output is viable for our system/
  • Motor control: Use working Gcode files to evaluate motor precision and speed.

Validation methods:

  • Run tests with a variety of pdfs with images, text, or both to determine effectiveness of the system.

Ethan’s Status Report for 11/15

The only work I did early in the week was prepare for the interim demos. This included making a list of talking points and details that I wanted to share with the instruction staff. This work was not particularly difficult or time consuming, but it was necessary to ensure I remained within the demo time limit while conveying all the necessary information.

In the back half of the week the team started getting in parts necessary for the structure of the gantry. On Friday, Andrew and myself were able to increase the length of the gantry with the new 1200mm rods. The reason for this change was highlighted in last week’s team report. Additionally, the prefabricated cart arrived which allowed everyone to start planning how to attach our gantry securely to the cart. More details on this in this weeks team report.

Looking forward to next week, I want to be able to finish the structure with the gantry on it. This will allow us to start testing the wheels and the pdf splicing software.

Team Status Report for 11/8

This week, our team made major progress on building the gantry. Because of the interim demo, the majority of our time was focused on building the initial gantry and integrating it with the software. The build was close to finished early in the week after extensive troubleshooting, laser cutting, and 3D-printing.

On the software side, we made progress on integrating the Flask website with the motion control system. The website can now handle PDF uploads and automatically convert them to SVG files. Although we initially planned to host the site and run the converter on the Raspberry Pi 5, we ran into some connection issues. As a temporary solution, we configured the system to operate locally for the interim demo.

We also worked on the motor control to make sure that the movement of the gantry matched the actual drawing. We are planning to finalize preparations for the interim demo and then begin designing and ordering parts for the final vertical gantry structure. We had a design change for the vertical gantry structure as we decided to extend our gantry vertically enough to cover close the the height of a standard whiteboard. This makes it so that we can focus more on the horizontal movement of the gantry on wheels, as well as perhaps implementing additional features. It will also free up some budget for the horizontal movement.

We will also decide on the final SVG conversion component, comparing results between the SpirePDF and the alternative converter. We have caught up to our initial schedule and we’re confident in the progress we made this week.

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Alex’s Status Report for 11/8

This week started with building the gantry. I helped Andrew with part of it on Wednesday before we finally finished it. After that, I worked on getting the motors to function properly. I did a lot of tuning for the motor control to make sure real world distances matched the program distances. Ethan and I also tried to set up the Pi but we ran into a couple different connection issues. After spending a lot of our day on that, we decided that it was a better use of our time to get everything working on a computer, and we could fix the Pi after the interim demo.

Next week I will help finalize our interim demo preparations. I also plan on flashing the Pi again to see if we can get it working. After that I will work with my team to start ordering the parts for the final structure, and we will hopefully be able to start building that soon. I am fairly on track schedule-wise

Andrew’s Status Report for 11/8

This week, I made significant progress on building the gantry system. I faced some challenges which included a lot of troubleshooting for the build as a lot of the pieces did not fit properly similar to last week. I had to do more laser cutting as well as modifying new 3D printed parts that I got from Ethan. Despite the considerable amount of time the assembly took, we now have a fully operational gantry which is a major milestone for our project.

On the software side, I worked with Ethan to integrate the website and the motion control. Tomorrow, I will do some tests to see how the Flash interface connects to the file conversion to make sure that we are ready for the interim demo.

Next week, I will focus on finalizing the plan for building our final gantry as well as ordering parts with the group. I will also work with Ethan to finalize which software component we will be using for the SVG conversion after comparing our results as I used SpirePDF and he used another component.

After seeing how our gantry in operation, I am more confident in our final build. I believe we are all caught up to our initial schedule.

Ethan’s Status Report for 11/8

This week I played a lot of catchup in preparation for the interim demo. Early in the week I finished 3D printing the necessary parts and helped Andrew assemble some of the gantry. The gantry assembly was finished on Wednesday, which allowed me to test the PDF to SVG file converter that I started this week. Then I integrated Andrew’s local host website on the Flask server with my converted to allow for PDF uploads to the site and convert them to SVG automatically. The original intention was to host the site and do the SVG conversion on the Raspberry Pi 5, but we had some hiccups connecting to the Pi which needs some further evaluation. This means I had to change our approach for the demo and make the code be able to work on one of our team members’ computers instead.

Looking forward to next week, assuming the interim demo goes as planned, I will make changes to the existing gantry design. For the demo we plan to have the gantry functional horizontally so some modified parts are required for vertical drawing. Additionally, I want to order the parts for the structure which can hopefully arrive and start assembly in the back half of the week or the start of the week after.

Ethan’s Status Report for 11/1

This week did not go to plan. I acquired the 3D printed parts along with the laser cut parts I made last week. However, upon starting the construction of the gantry we ran into some issues. Notably the laser cut parts did not fit with the 3D printed parts. Therefore, we had to pivot back to 3D printed parts. This means we had to place an order for 3D printer filament which arrived very late in the week. That same day I started printing some of the parts that needed to be replaced. However, this is very time consuming since Techspark only has one 3D printer that can be used if you bring your own filament. Therefore, I had to strategically print batches such that the printer was going over night. At the time of this post 5 of 7 of the necessary parts are printed. Therefore, assuming no other hiccups the construction will be done on Monday. This allows for us to have enough time to test our code on the gantry for interim demo.

Looking toward next week I will be finish 3D printing the rest of the necessary parts and assemble the gantry. Then I will switch over to the software side in order to prepare for the demo. I will also order the parts for the structure once the gantry is assembled.

Andrew’s Status Report for 11/1

This week, I continued to work on both the gantry assembly as well as the Flash website. We worked on assembly early in the week before realizing we needed to make some adjustments to the 3D printed parts. We needed to order filament which arrived on Friday. 3D printing wrapped up today, so tomorrow, I will be going in to hopefully assemble the gantry structure tomorrow.

On the software side, I made more progress by adding a logging feature that records each upload and its corresponding PDF-to-G-code conversion result. This will help us track performance and debug any issues once the hardware integration begins.

Our goal this week is to finish assembling the gantry and begin testing full integration with the web upload to the motor control. Since we actually worked on building and seeing how it will come together, I am optimistic that the gantry will be running as we intend to for the demo.

Team Status Report for 11/1

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.