This week, I focused on preparing our design presentation. For the slides, I mainly filled out the block diagram and mechanical solution and implementation sides. With my group, I then met with our professor and the TA to discuss potential improvements to our presentation. After some advice from our TA to add more implementation details, Lauren and I met to finalize sensor placement and Jetson Nano GPIO allocation.
I also spent a lot of time finalizing the mechanism. After deciding to reduce our target mechanism latency to <1s last week, I began researching different linear motor actuators. The main types of mechanisms I found were screwball, rack and pinion, and belt driven. It seems like all of these mechanisms are suitable for our use case given that we can adjust the mechanism speed based on gear sizes. I was also able to find CAD mechanisms for the rack and pinion and belt driven mechanisms so that we can hopefully laser cut most of our mechanism.
My progress is slightly behind. I focused most of my time on the hardware aspect of our project and on finalizing the slides, so I was not able to research different image classification models. Hopefully, we can use the resnet model that Lauren and I found a couple of weeks ago.
Next week, I hope to hook up our sensors to an Arduino and begin collecting data. Although we have a general idea of which stepper motors and motor drivers we want, we also need to submit the purchasing request.