Schedule This week’s task was to work on the Z linear motion, and along with Maxine, finish the gripper. Progress This Week This week, Maxine and I made a couple adjustments to the schedule. Since the gantry turned out to be a lot more components than we expected, I’m now responsible also for the gripper. I was able to finish the Z linear motion. First, I made a rack and pinion structure. And since I found it likely to be…
This week our team has settled back into our respective homes and had more time to explore the adjustments to our project after switching to remote. Claire and I (Maxine) worked on Fusion360. We both started with basic tutorials to learn the fundamentals of the software. The current goal is to do our best to simulate the implementation plan we had previously. We thought about switching to a robotic arm since there are more online resources on how to build…
After settling back in Hong Kong with my 14 day quarantine, I had some time to do a more in-depth exploration of Fusion360. I followed several tutorials and started to get the hang of Fusion360’s fundamentals. Claire and I had a discussion whether we should switch to simulating a robotic arm instead of the gantry approach for a few reasons. The gantry approach was what we were going to do in implementation before the virus hit. We were familiar with…
Schedule The newly updated schedule can be seen in our weekly team meeting. From this updated Gantt chart, this week’s focus is scoping and learning about Fusion 360 and seeing if it can work. Progress This Week This week, I was able to accomplish what our Gantt chart set out. I set up Fusion 360 and tried to follow a few tutorials. I realized that creating each component from scratch was going to be very time consuming and quite difficult….
This week has been wild. A global pandemic hit and now capstone is remote. No one expected this, so the course staff also took some time to respond. This week has been us trying to adjust to our new reality. We spent our meetings discussing how to proceed in the class. In terms of our project, we will have to rescope. In terms of meeting times, we settled on keeping the same time, since Claire and Maxine would be in…
This week has been spent planning and rescoping our project under these new working circumstances. Originally, I was responsible for most of the mechanical part assembly, but obviously this is now not possible since we won’t have access to Techspark and Claire and I will be working from the other side of the world. We spent this week exploring the different CAD simulation software we could use to simulate the design of our mechanical system. I looked into Solidworks, I…
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…
This week we were finally able to get over a lot of the bottlenecks that were preventing us from continuing. We got the rods we were waiting for (they ended up being in the 1300 wing all this time, but the ticket was never updated). The Raspberry Pi is completely set up. We ordered some new parts, including a new camera, which should be able to fix some of our image quality issues. Maxine was able to print everything from…
We were informed that the gantry actually arrived a few weeks ago but was never put in the system, but at least now we know when to verify when parts arrive. Before spring break, I spent the week customizing our parts and making any necessary adjustments to fit the gantry better. I also printed more parts for the remainder of the assembly, and went to get the nuts and bolts needed for assembly. Everything should be all ready to go…
Schedule Per our Gantt Chart, this week I was supposed to set up the servo motors. However, I’m lagging a bit behind this week, partially due to the short week, but my other classes are also taking up much more time than expected. Progress This Week This week I was able to work more on the stepper motors. I wrote some python code for the servos but have not tested with the Raspberry Pi (will have to coordinate with Arka…