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Team Status Report – 11/8

This week, we met up multiple times as a team to talk about our progress and work together to get a minimum viable product done for the demo. Safiya worked on 3D printing all our parts and CADing our designs. Additionally, she worked on laser printing our LivePin board. Crystal is working on getting our servos working concurrently. Today we tested how well the servo works on the 3D printed board that Safiya worked on, and it was successful. Tedd finished the software pipeline, but needs to find a better hardware replacement for the Intel Realsense camera and needs a replacement for the Raspberry Pi.

Tomorrow, we will do a full run through of the demo that we are planning on showing. No changes were made to the existing design of the system. Right now, the most significant risks that could hurt this project is if we cannot get communication between the NUC and the STM32. Additionally, if we cannot get a good enough depth camera that could pick up small details, it could really jeopardize our project because our pins won’t be able to output a good enough image.

Here are a few pictures:

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Tedd’s Status Report – 11/8

This week, I worked on getting the Raspberry Pi script done for the depth camera and the csv output. However, upon setting up the Raspberry Pi, I realized that it is actually faulty. As a result, we will be using my Intel NUC for the time being, just so that we have something to demo on for this week.

The script works well and prompts the depth camera when run, but I suspect that there is an issue with the camera because it is not able to pick up important facial features and details that other cameras should be able to pick up. We suspect that it may be a problem with the Intel Realsense camera and are hoping to find an alternative or purchase another one. It is important for us to be able to have a camera that can pick up small details because our picture will ultimately be downsampled, so if we are already at a disadvantage with our camera quality, we will be at a bigger disadvantage when it comes to our image output on the pin board.

Regardless, I am still able to run the script on the NUC, and it works well. All we need to get done is figure out a way to send the CSV file to the STM32 for further computation and ultimately allow us to push the pins out.

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Safiya’s Status Report 11/1

Redesigned pinions to work for 180 degree servos, thus causing a redesing in the carriage. It got larger and all spaceing between servos were adjusted. I finished the CAD of the carriage.

I got my 3D printer working, made adjustments to the rack design, and got the first nice print of a rack. I am now starting to print the pinions, and then hopefully Sunday, the carriage.

I redid purchasing, as some of our Amazon purchases got lost due to the AWS crash event.

I am now designing the Z axis gantry system and gearbox, hopefully full CAD done by Monday.

Here is the progress so far on the full assembly CAD, I included a before, so the progress can be shown, the first design (which is actually a second design) is all over the place and unfinished, more of a proof of concept, and the finalized design is the one that is more clean, with belt and stuff to proportion. It still has a couple more tweaks but will hopefully be done this Monday (11/3).

Pin Board is also a work in progress, especially designing its mounting system

A few design questions moving forward:
– Is one set of bars enough to support the carriage ?
– Is one pin board enough to support the pins?
– Where can reset mechanism go?
(after, V3)(before, V2)

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Team Status Report – 11/1

Budget is still a big concern for the viability of this project. We currently cannot afford to buy dowels and 32 servo motors, so we are looking for other avenues to get free continuous servo motors. There has been a slight change to the design of the system, specifically the actuator subsystem. Though not specified in any documentation, we originally planned to use 180 servo motors. However, a rotation of 180 degrees is not sufficient enough to actuate the pins. Continuous rotation servos are more expensive, requiring us to spend $50, but I will see if I can hunt for some free ones.

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Crystal’s Status Report – 11/1

This week I worked on the firmware of this project. I designed the architecture of the firmware by creating 4 schedulable tasks: the UART message, actuator movement, gantry movement, and reseting. I am on schedule. Next week I hope to be able to have the firmware working with at least 2 actuators, a gantry motor (since the other one didn’t come in), and actual UART messages with the actuator heights.

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Tedd’s Status Report – 11/1

This week, I continued to work on getting the script that I created onto the Raspberry Pi that we acquired for our project. I outlined the steps we need to get this to work. First, I need to install all the required dependencies. Then, I would need to copy the script and data into the Raspberry Pi. Next, I would need to run the Raspberry Pi with a display, and then finally save the CSV so that it could be used for the drivers. This is a very simplified process of what I am currently working on.

The next steps after this to to work with Crystal and Safiya to start getting all the parts working together for our demo. In order to do this, I would need to coordinate with Crystal to make sure all the drivers are working properly, and Safiya to make sure that our design requirements are met and the system is built properly.