This week, I worked on the gantry control system and made significant progress. Early in the week, I connected the servomotor to the Pi and tested our ability to control the servo with the Pi. I wrote a test file for testing the servomotor, which proved that we could precisely control the servomotor to go to a specific angle. I worked with Chris on finishing the preliminary code for the gantry control system, which contains several control functions involving manipulating the servo and stepper motors to perform tasks. I wrote a new test file for testing the stepper motors, and experimented with several different motions and controls to ensure we could manipulate our stepper motors in the way we desired.
My progress is on schedule this week. I was able to wrap up setting up the hardware for our project, which includes the Pi, the motor shield, the stepper motors, the servomotor, and the connections between these parts. I finished the preliminary code for the gantry control system and I extensively tested the control of our motors.
In the next week, we will begin testing our system as a whole, and ensuring our subsystems are correctly interacting with each other and performing our desired tasks. We will also deal with any issues that may arise from testing. I will modify our code to account for any problems that may occur, or to make our software more efficient and accurate.