Neeti’s Status Report for 02/22
This week I worked on doing research for the design review while Gauri and Shrutika figured out how to ssh into the Pis. This was due to the fact that there are only two Pis and I did not have a USB to USB-c cable which I will need in the future to be able to connect my laptop to the Pis. However, I was able to flesh out the details of how the Pis will interact with the motor. I did some research on different motors – stepper, DC, gear, etc. and the different tradeoffs of each. We finally decided on stepper motors for their precision, and high-torque, low-speed capabilities. I realized we needed a motor controller as the GPIO pins do not have enough power to drive the motor directly and this would fry the pins. I also looked into libraries we could use to interface with the motor controller through GPIO pins and came across the rpio.gpio, rpi.gpio and servoblaster libraries that allow us to directly interact with the motor controller through the pi and have either software or hardware Ultimately, I suggested we use a motor controller hat as it provides very convenient libraries for motor control, sits on the Pi itself and also has motor control built-in.
I also spent some time looking at this project that is very similar to ours in terms of requirements:
Additionally, we discussed how we would interface between the microphones and the Pi as well as the camera and the Pi. We were able to narrow down the specific numbers and models for the microphones as well as the camera. We also talked about some of the software requirements for the project such as a hand/not-hand classifier for our manual mode and how we would organize the code for continuous sensor input and triggering motor rotation.
In the upcoming week, we will finalize all our design decisions and complete the design review report. I also hope to order the motor controller hat and motor and get started on Pi-motor communication!