Abha’s Status Update for March 7

The first part of my week was spent working on the design report.

After that, since the SD cards had come in, I set up a Raspberry Pi with Jade’s help. Then I worked on setting up the display for the text. Although I didn’t think this would take too long, it took a little longer than anticipated. Their were a few setup issues that I had to go through before it worked, such as issues with the config files, with the dual desktop screen defaults that Raspberry Pi 4s have, and with the resolution. I also set up the Pi on Wifi and SSH. The text portion of the project will consist of showing the sentence output of the story generation algorithm onto a white background with black text on the display.

I also had a meeting with a representative from TechSpark. He gave me two pieces of advice that I found useful. The first one was to look into standards for holes/gaps/connections for toys for children (i.e. vent holes for heat dissipation, screw holes, etc). The second one was to laser cut my frame with cardboard and iterate my design through testing with cardboard. When the final design is ready, then I could use acrylic to save money. Since the CAD and robot design is complicated, he anticipates that I will go through a few iterations before the final design. I found our discussion very fruitful.

Next week is Spring Break so I plan to not work. The week after that, I will first finalize the CAD of the robot frame. I will also get the eyes displays working. If I have time, I will lasercut the CAD design of the frame with cardboard, and figure out how to fix and improve my design. I am still on schedule.