The principal risk to the completion of the project at this late stage is the slowness with which assembly of the mount is proceeding. We also need to finish addressing the integration of the CV routines Joy has written with the mount hardware, such as the libgphoto2 interface to the mount camera. Given the remote nature of most of the remaining work, the only recourse seems to be the scheduling of more frequent status meetings until the dates of the in-lab demo and the final presentation. We’ve also created a Google document to list goals for each day of this final week.
No changes to the schedule or system design have been made.
Here’s a picture of a partially assembled motor controller PCB:
Feeding power to the 12V input of the buck converter that’s assembled on the bottom of the PCB causes the expected 5V to appear at the VDD pad, which is a promising result given the difficulty of soldering the SMD components. Tests of the remainder of the board (which composes the actual motor controller) should occur tomorrow afternoon at the latest.