Category: Team Status Reports

This week’s focus for us was to incorporate the feedback we received from the design presentation. We decided to refine our system design. The significant thing that we decided to change was adding the wheels back into our gantry design so our gantry can move horizontally. Before this week, we had taken out the wheels since we had a budget constraint. After some research, we potentially found a more affordable option by using a premade wagon base.

Progress was made on both software and hardware this week as well. On the software side, we continued to work on the file upload and parsing. We were able to continue testing the PDF conversion to G-code. On the hardware side, the part orders were finalized and  we began preparing for motor setup and control testing. Most of the ordered components have arrived. As a result, next week will focus heavily on system integration.

We plan to get the motors running. We will also begin integrating the software upload with the hardware control system to start full end-to-end testing. While we’re slightly behind schedule due to the design revisions, but hopefully the updated plan puts us in good position to catch up quickly.

Part A was written by Alex

Our project has the potential to create impact on a global scale. For one, it has potential for use in any academic institution around the world. The technology would be easily adaptable and can theoretically transcribe any PDF, meaning regardless of language or location, it would still work. It is also cheaper and more transportable than the systems it replaces, like classroom projectors. It also integrates well with whiteboards or chalkboards, which are common around the world. We also hope to make it easy to use, meaning anyone, even those with limited technical knowledge should be able to make use of it.

Part B was written by Ethan

The project at a glance does not seem to have any major cultural considerations, but even at a small scale any sort of automation can have a cultural impact as to some extent, someone’s job is being done by a machine. Our intentions with the project is not to automate someone’s job, but instead be a tool to help teachers, presenters, and companies focus on the important parts involving putting text or diagrams on a whiteboard, getting the their point across and having the content being easily editable.

From a larger perspective this project strengthens the wider movement of automation in many aspects of industry. The subject of automation is still quite divisive to many, and our project further encourages using machines and to an extent, robots, in front of a very impressionable group, children.

Part C was written by Andrew

From an environmental standpoint, our gantry will be drawing directly on whiteboards and other reusable surfaces, in classrooms and meeting spaces, so that means there’s no need to use paper copies of diagrams, which helps reduce paper waste over time. The hardware also runs on low power with the Raspberry Pi and Arduino using potentially less energy than a projector would. We also will be 3D printing some of our own parts in Techspark which helps limit shipping and packaging waste.

Unfortunately, as we have yet to receive feedback from the design presentation, we weren’t able to make an adjustments to our design plans this week. We did add some items to our BOM, such as power supply units. Because we removed wheels from our BOM, these costs can be easily absorbed into our remaining budget.

Our main risks going forward are centered in the structural section and motor control section. For structure, it’s unclear if our current setup will fully support the gantry weight, but we are planning on mitigating this risk by building and testing it early enough that we have time to add additional supports. For motor control, we may need some more parts or attachments to make the motors function correctly. Again, we are mitigating this issue by finding these flaws as early as next week.

Next week the team will complete the design report, website, and CAD, and will work on motor control, planning, and construction.

After last week’s presentations, we wanted to incorporate the some of the feedback we received. Firstly, we decided that some of our requirements we somewhat unreasonable such as having 95% accuracy and precision for drawing strokes. We reevaluated some of these requirements and decided on figures that were reasonable and justifiable.

Next we finalized our bill of materials (BOM) and while doing so we realized that we were going to be overbudget. The primary source of our spending is on structural and mechanical parts such as motors, rails, and wheels. In order to maintain the most functionality we decided to remove the wheels and the automatic horizontal adjustment functionality from our design for the following reasons:

1. We plan to showcase our design on the moveable whiteboards found in the 1300 hallway of Hamershlag Hall. These boards are much taller than they are wide. Therefore during our final presentation it would be unlikely that we’d be able to showcase the automatic horizontal movement.
2. Re-adding the wheels/horizontal movement would be a lot easier than trying to re-add rails/vertical movement. In the case where we end up under budget, it would be impossible to add the rails at a later date. However, wheels could be added later as they would be attached to the existing structure with only minimal changes.

Our final change this week was ditching the ultra sonic sensors used for dynamic dimension allotment. We decided that adding the sensors would be too bulky and a better alternative could be a basic monochrome camera which detects lines drawn by the user as bounds. However, we are still determining if this idea is worth implementing now that we no longer have horizontal functionality.

Looking toward next week, we plan to work on the following:

• Finish the website where the user will upload their PDF
• Get feedback from the Design Presentation to incorporate into our requirements and structure
• Place the remaining orders for materials on our BOM

Below are our answers to the questions outlined on Status Report 2:

A was written by Andrew
Our project is designed with user safety in mind. Since it involves motors and other moving parts on the gantry system, we are ensuring that those components are shielded or enclosed to prevent accidental injury during operation. The system will be designed so that users do not need to physically interact with the gantry once it begins drawing, minimizing the risk of harm.  Our project will be used for teaching, presenting, and collaborating. It reduces the time and effort required to manually copy diagrams onto a whiteboard which makes tasks less tedious and more reliable. It also gives users the chance for make quick edits. From the welfare perspective, this contributes to user well-being by streamlining preparation and letting people focus on the task at hand such as teaching rather than on repetitive manual work.

B was written by Alex

The robot particularly helps support teachers and students by automating the whiteboard writing process. This could help support underfunded schools by giving them access to a technology similar to smartboards or projectors that they may be unable to afford. It’s a mostly lower cost design that could be used throughout a building. These underfunded schools are often home to communities that are often underserved or underrepresented. It can also help aid in communication, as the whiteboard medium is one of collaboration, and this device would only make that easier.

C was written by Ethan.
We designed our project to be customizable and usable anywhere. Specifically we were targeting school teachers. This could have economic implications as we envisioned our project to be used on any type of whiteboard. Therefore schools would only need one gantry system that could be shared in the building. This would ultimately save money in schools since teachers would be more productive and thus a higher percentage of their salary would be spent on teaching. This could have a similar economic impact in other industries if used before meetings to save the setup time for the presenter.

This week was our first full week working on our new project direction after pivoting from our original idea of building an automated stroller last week. The change meant we had to spend a good amount of time brainstorming. Once we had the the idea, we worked together to define the requirements as well creating the proposal presentation together. The presentation itself went well, and it gave us a solid chance to talk through the system as a team.

Since we changed directions last week, we were a bit behind where we had liked to be. Despite this, we worked efficiently, and are planning to lock down the Bill of Materials quickly so parts can be ordered.

Plans for Next Week:

• Finalize the BOM and place part orders.
• Start CAD modeling for the gantry.
• Build an initial upload page for file submissions.
• Set up the Raspberry Pi and Arduino so they’re ready for hardware testing as soon as parts arrive.

Even though the pivot put us under some pressure, this week felt productive. We came together on the new idea, got through the proposal presentation, and set ourselves up to move forward.