Schedule

Throughout Spring Break, COVID-19 hit hard, and while I was on my last days on break, we received word from the university that there will be no academic reason to come back to campus and we were strongly encouraged to go home. This is going to be a pretty big hardship in our hardware-based project.

Progress This Week

This week, I packed my bags and moved out of Pittsburgh and back to Taiwan. Besides that, our capstone has been predominately thinking about how to rescope and checking whether or not rescoping is possible. On Monday, we had a quick chat with Jiaqi about the changes that will be made to Capstone. For us, this meant that the software will probably not change too but, but the hardware will be predominately simulation based. On Wednesday, we had our meeting with the course staff, and ran through some more options provided that simulation is not feasible due to potential constraints.

I tested out SolidWorks from Taiwan through VirtualAndrew, and it was non-ideal to use in terms of latency. I was unable to select more that two objects at once. This seemed like it would pose a significant problem. So, I looked into Fusion 360. Since it runs locally, the user experience is much more smooth and enjoyable. Fusion 360 is definitely still a risk because neither me nor Maxine have any experience with it, but we are going to make the best of it!

As a group, we also worked on our one page update.

Next Week’s To-do

Next week, I want to start working on the simulation. Also, we will need to come up with an updated schedule. Maxine and I will have to split up the work (once she settles into Hong Kong). Even without explicitly splitting up work, I can begin working on modeling the rack and pinion and the gripper. With more experience with Fusion 360, we will be able to come up with a reasonable guide to how much we can do by the end of the semester.