Category: Team Status Reports

This week our team is wrapping up our project. We have completed all implementation and testing so we’re preparing for the final demo, final poster, final video, and final report.

We are going back through our project and creating visuals and diagrams for these components.

We are on schedule.

This week our team focused on integrating all our parts together. We ran into a few difficulties in integrating our code. However, we worked through the issues and got most of our code integrated. Potential problems we see looking into the future are running into bugs when testing due to edge cases arising that we did not account for. However, with good testing we can find these edge cases and make sure they don’t become a problem.

Our hardware which we saw as one of the biggest risks initially is working well. There is in a video below that shows it working. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nLV_yfrHJHVyOtZJjgG1TjcCs474YqKd/view?usp=sharing

Outside of that we are finishing up the work on our final presentation. After that we need to do some final touch ups and then begin work on our final demo and video.

Our project has been going well and it looks like we are on pace to finish in time. We are putting the finishing touches on a lot of our project and are going to start testing and integrating all of the separate pieces now. We have to start working together to make sure all the pieces fit together well.

This is a potential risk bringing everything together. Making sure that all the individual parts of the hardware and the software fit together and then the software and hardware work well together is something that may be difficult. However, with good coordination among the team this is definitely something that we can accomplish.

Our schedule is looking good and without any major issues the schedule should progress smoothly.

This week we assembled most of our hardware parts by laser cutting all the wood pieces. As a team, our biggest focus was how to connect the two gears with precision, and ensuring that the gear rotating the hanger is the absolute center of rotation. In order to achieve this we have Laser cut alignment wood with a hole in the middle because 3D printing will eliminate human error of guessing where the center of the servo is. In addition, we have tested the metal-metal epoxy because this attachment is used between servo and smaller gear and is also used between clothes rack and bigger gear. After waiting for an entire night, we have ensured that it won’t fall off easily, and will hold when we use the servo to rotate the hanger. In addition, this week we have debugged many issues we had with the software so now all we need to do as a group would be debugging the interface between software and hardware, and do some actual function testing for our entire system as a whole.

Getting closer to assembling the entire hardware, we have identified a couple of potential risk factors. One of them would be our design relies on metal-metal epoxy to attach the gears to the servo and the hanger. It was strong enough to stay attached when we had no clothes on, but it might not be able to hold when we rotate with clothes on since the surface area of the gear is not that big. We will mitigate this risk by validating our attachment with clothes on tomorrow, and if this doesn’t work, we might want to get bigger gears to increase the attachment surface area.

These are the pictures of some parts of our hardware

This week we received our new servo and tested it out. It fixed all the problems we had with our last servo and it could rotate to fixed degrees so that was one problem we had solved. In addition it was rated stronger so it could handle the loads we needed. So with that we are back on schedule now and we are projected to finish on time.

One small risk we have identified is whether our base will have enough strength to support the clothing on top of it. However, we bought thicker wood to add more strength. In addition we are trying to add weights to the base to make it more sturdy. We believe this will be enough to compensate for this. If not we can add a larger base to the bottom of the stand in order to be able to handle all the weight.

This week we ran into a problem with our servo where we realized it lacked the capabilities we needed to exactly turn to a degree that we wanted. This required us to change our design to a 270 degree servo and user gear ratio in order to fully spin the wheel. However, this was risk we had accounted for an we had backup parts ready to order.

Even though the servo didn’t work fully, we were still able to test our design and realized that it would be feasible. So despite having to change a few parts of our design the base concept would work and we can continue with assembling the hardware. The rest of the project is going well and we did account for there being flaws in our hardware design so the schedule is still looking good. Once we finish the hardware assembly that will the biggest risk of our project finished.

Link to video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W-uDNRuHiA_ZS4i7cMAcf0UPFy9S0NnW/view?usp=sharing

 

This week we gave our design proposal and got good feedback about our design. Going into next week we need to work on the written part of the proposal. We changed our design to incorporate gears with our servo to turn our rack.

One of the biggest risks we see moving forward is attaching the gears to the rack and the servo. In order to find good solutions for this we want to have a working prototype done by the end of this week. The solution we are currently looking at is a metal epoxy but this may change going into the future.

On the software side things are looking good and our programs are beginning to take shape. We just have to make sure we stay on schedule and give ourselves enough time to account for bugs.

This is the new schedule we made to reflect the changes in our hardware design.

This week we finalized our design and worked on creating our design review presentation. In creating the design presentation we finalized our system specification for the hardware and software sides of our presentation. We also specified how we were going to implement our design.

One of the risks we see on the software side is achieving the required accuracy levels. In order to do this we will preemptively begin working on our the training and allocating more time to it in order to achieve the accuracy we need.

On the hardware side the main risk we currently see is building a strong enough support base to hold up all our clothes. In order to mitigate this risk we have been looking into materials to build our base with and have been carefully planning the structure we are planning to use to ensure it can hold the weight.

Overall we are still on pace and are looking to present a good design review and get good feedback about our design.

After giving our presentation we realized that our hardware side had issues in implementation. With the help of our advisors we brainstormed a new idea to use a rotational hanger system attached to a base, link goes more in depth. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n_NDpZC0ni2qttofl1uJjUk9jUlInqgykfnHyiBxZws/edit?usp=sharing) 

After creating a new design we fixed design requirements for weight and used that to calculate the torque that we would need. We also looked into what kind of motors would fit our precision and strength requirements. We ended up choosing servos because they fit those requirements. Although this did set us back in our schedule a few days we have also removed the CAD elements of our project which should allow the schedule to keep going as planned.

One risk we see moving forward is receiving negative feedback about the design and having to redesign it. However, from the communication we have had so far with our advisors it looks like we have met their requirements and are confident about this design.

Another risk is in our calculations to determine friction. We found friction coefficients for turntable bearings online but not for the models that we could realistically purchase. In order to mitigate this risk we added leeway in our calculations and are looking for a servo stronger than the minimum requirement.

This week as a team we worked on how we wanted to implement our design. The biggest risk we saw going forward was creating a bad design for our hardware which we would then execute and waste money on. In order to mitigate these risks we came up with multiple plans for our hardware system. That we would can present all of these to our advisors and see which would give us the best chance for success. This did cause to have to add new potential designs but this is something we expected going into the process. Overall we are still on track to present our project proposal and pick the best design of the ones we have created.