The first part of the week was spent on finishing the final presentation. After that, I started working on the GUI that we would present on public demo day. Initially, we manually put in a file path to an image and then it would pop up some windows to show what was being rendered. Since we wanted a more robust UI, I used Tkinter on Python to create a better interface. It now allows the user to navigate to a file of their choice, and it shows the original image, the segmented image, and the rendered image (image as it should look on the canvas) in a cleaner interface. After this, we were facing two main problems. The first one was that the pulleys weren’t aligned well, and it was causing our gantry to have variable resistance. This was causing our gantry to jam once in a while. We decided to print new pulleys with more screw holes to be able to center the shaft in the pulleys. The second problem we were facing was that the motors weren’t able to draw enough current through our motor board, since it’s only rated for 1A. We tried to overpower the board, but it wasn’t enough, so we’re exploring ways to solve this problem. I helped Chris with both these tasks. I did other small tasks such as creating a new metal water cup and spray painting it, as well as applying lubricant to the gantry.
I was on task this week. I was able to complete a basic UI that we can use to demo our project. I was also able to help Chris with other tasks involving optimization of the gantry. Before our demo, I will work with the team to center the pulleys correctly and fix the power problem to eliminate jamming.