Posted on

Safiya’s Status Report 12/6

What I accomplished :
I belted the entire system and remounted the linear ball-bearing mounts. The carriage now travels up and down smoothly across the full stroke. I remounted the LivePin board at the correct spacing from the carriage. I also designed and fabricated the reset mechanism, including two custom acrylic brackets. One set to mount the linear actuators and another to hold the reset plate that clears the pins.

Needs to get done :
I need to make sure after programming is done with the 32 servos, to make sure the racks and pinions all interact properly and there are no mechanical faults. Also the final report and video need to be done, along with all servo testing.

On Track:
Yes, but with some setbacks.

Posted on

Team Status Report 12/6

Unit Testing:

  • Gantry moved up and down 5 times without faults
  • Z-axis limit switch homed the gantry reliably
  • Pin board stability: spot-checked ~1/3 of pins.  All moved freely and stayed seated
  • Reset button triggered linear actuators to retract and clear all pins
  • Quick user test via Google Form
  • Software unit tests: matplotlib visualization
  • Not yet tested: rack-and-pinion row (all-retract, all-extend, mixed depths)

Findings:

User Findings: 

  • Heart: 100% of respondents identified correctly
  • House: 100% of respondents identified correctly
  • Abraham Lincoln:
    – 91% of respondents identified correctly
    – Skull, face, or Abraham Lincoln were considered correct answers
    –     Respondents were asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how similar the images on the right were

    • Mean: 6.85
    • Median: 7

Gantry:

Smooth travel on rails, stop within 1 second of limit switch trigger, flips direction on button press.

Posted on

Tedd’s Status Report – 12/6

This week was pretty hectic. Early this week, we had our final presentation, where we presented our final designs and finishing touches on our project. However, we ran into a few issues with some parts, causing us to find alternatives specifically in the firmware. The software components stayed the same and there is still consistency for that portion. However, we have a lot of wires and still need to get servos to get fully working.

A large part of this week was implementing the reset mechanism. With a transparent plate as our reset plate and with two linear actuators, we were able to fully implement this on our pin board, allowing us to automatically reset the pin board when the image is created.

The finishing touches on our product will just be gluing more dowels and wiring the servo motors and finally integrating all the subsystems before the final demos on Monday.

Posted on

Crystal’s Status Report – 12/6

This week was quite eventful. I fried one of our pwm expanders which was a critical part of our project. To fix this there were 4 possible solutions: connect 10 servos to the stm and 6 to the raspberry pi and use UART signaling to initiate servo motor movement (all servos would not be able to move at once, give up on 6 of them and only drive 26 servo motor, use an arduino to drive the remaining servo motors, or use an Arduino Mega. Originally, I borrowed an Arduino Mega from Roboclub, but their Mega was broken and the I2C did not work. We had to borrow one from Justin from Techspark. I had to rewrite the STM code on to the Arduino. We are on track to finish because we have to. Next week we hope to finish everything (duh).