Gauri’s Status Report for 02/15

First status report!  We had multiple meetings this week to discuss which parts to order, collect and evaluate whether the RPi ZW would work for our project, read and figure out how to set up the SD cards to boot Raspbian OS onto the RPi 4.  We also met with a mechanical engineer friend today to get some guidance on how to design our rotating platform and how it would connect to the motor and how the wiring between the Pi, motor and sensors would fit in.  We spent some time setting up our blog as well. 🙂

In addition, this week I read chapters 1-3 of the textbook and did the reading assignment.  I also spent some time going over the methods Neeti and I learned in our Embedded projects (2 and 4) where we implemented servo motor control using PWM to control the angle of the motor and Pi-Pi networked PID communication between two DC motors on different Pis.  I figured that for this project our requirements are slightly different but similar ideas could apply.  We essentially want to control the motor using either “left” or “right” instructions and rotate the motor by some fixed angle at some fixed speed in whichever direction the signal specifies.

We are not really behind on our original schedule but we have not started some things we hoped to start this week because we do not have all the parts we need yet.  We hope that we will be able to catch up by next week once the RPis arrive and we can officially start working with the hardware.

By next week, I think Neeti and I should have figured out how to control a motor with an RPi 4 (hopefully both speed and angle).  Since this is similar to our Embedded projects, we think it should be doable in a few days once we have the Pis.