In the beginning of the week, I spent a significant amount of time preparing the gantry control system and motor setup for the team’s demo on Monday. Chris and I worked together on writing a demo file that would make our gantry system go through the motions of drawing a square or a line. We spent a lot of time on Sunday making sure our system was working smoothly. This included slightly modifying parts of our gantry and motor system as well as the software controlling it, such as adjusting the motor speeds and sanding down certain parts. Following our demo, I worked on implementing a capability for our gantry system to draw diagonal lines, as the default library we are using only has the ability to control one of the stepper motors at a time. I wrote code that will be able to control the two motors in parallel.
My progress this week is on schedule. The bulk of the gantry control system and motor setup is completed, and the remaining work is on optimizing our project and testing the robot’s functionality. In the next week, I will continue optimizing and modifying the gantry control system and gantry to finalize our project, as well as work with Chris and Harsh in putting our different subsystems together and testing our project as a whole. In particular, towards the beginning of the week, I will test the parallel motor code on our robot, especially once our gantry more finalized and our motors are locked in place.