Month: April 2019

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.

This week, we had the mid-project demo. The previous week, I had created the outline-strokes and the fill-in strokes, as well as come up with an initial color choosing algorithm. Chris decided to make the fill-in strokes faster, so I was left with making sure that the color-matching algorithm was robust. Initially, the algorithm was picking colors such as yellow and orange for the green. The same inaccuracy was true for other colors. After changing the weight values of the 3 HSV channels, I was able to make the algorithm quite accurate. This is what we demonstrated on the mid-project demo day. However, there were still a few inaccuracies, especially with the greens. We then decided to both improve the weight values through experimentation and also make sure that the stored palette color values were accurate. After making sure that the HSV values were perfect and improving the weights further, I ended up with a nearly perfect color choosing algorithm.

My progress is mostly on schedule this week. I’ve finished perfecting the color choosing algorithm. Since there were lots of software tasks left, most of the physical system had been built, and the remaining tasks required parts which had yet to arrive, Chris helped by making the fill-in algorithm faster (using matrix operations in python), and creating a faster plotting function. The other task I’m supposed to be finishing up soon is testing the painting algorithm on the gantry system. However, we were slightly delayed on that part, so I haven’t started testing yet. To make sure I catch up, I will spend extra time during Carnival to finish testing.

For the next week, I’m scheduled to work on testing the painting algorithm, and helping Chris and Eric with their tasks, since the software algorithm is more or less complete. This includes tasks such as calibration and optimizing the painting routines.

Much of my time this week was spent preparing for our demo on Monday. This involved finalizing all of the control we were able to achieve and creating demo scripts or use during our actual demo. Additionally I worked on improving the software portion of our project for the demo by speeding up how the objects were filled in. This involved creating more sophisticated code for identifying continuous horizontal regions of the code. I also changed the library used for drawing the rendered image to speed up the debugging process and created a simple debugging stroke drawing option which sacrifices accuracy for speed in order to test changes faster.

This week I was also able to begin the construction of our base board which the frame and gantry will attach to. This involved carefully measuring and cutting holes in the board for the legs of the frame to slot into. This has been completed, and the remaining work in this area is to make cutouts for the palette and water cup, as well as to attach the mounts for the stepper motors. These parts have not arrived yet, so for this reason I shifted my attention to the software components mentioned above.

Overall my progress this week has been mostly on schedule. Ideally I would have finished the construction of the base board this week, but as this was not possible due to the missing parts I was able to shift my focus to the other portions of the project and assist Eric and Harsh where needed. Next week I hope to finish construction of the baseboard and we can move on to more extensive testing of our physical system.

Over the last week, our team has worked on getting the control system ready to test the painting routines including the color grabbing routine, the brush cleaning routine, and the drawing routines. We also worked on creating the base board and improving the painting algorithm. In the beginning of the week, our team spent significant time preparing for the demo on Monday.

There are no new significant risks for our project that we foresee occurring in the future. Our mid-project demo went smoothly and we were able to create a functioning gantry system and a robust painting algorithm. Small risks include the parts of the gantry system wearing out over time, but that is something we took into account in our design. This is the reason we 3D-printed a lot of our parts, so that we could reprint them if they wear out. Any other risks we encounter should be mitigated through our careful planning and design.

No significant changes have been made to our design, and the realization of our robot is going smoothly and as planned. There are no major changes to our schedule, as our progress this week as a team is mostly on track.