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Logan Status Report 3/20

Last week:

Last week I spent a lot of time going through different launcher ideas with JP. As mentioned in our weekly report, we settled on a non-motorized version for our initial testing. Conveniently, ping pong balls fit perfectly in cardboard paper towel rolls so that will be a good way to rapidly get this prototype into being. I also found an online guide with some example code for driving a micro-stepping motor and ordered those parts as well as a DC motor and bridge to drive that.  I also did the design sketches for the launching mechanism we agreed to and of an initial idea for the final housing. Once I get the parts in hand, I can add those screw measurements and motor dimensions to the 3D model for the rotator mount and get that fabricated.

This week:

My tasks for this week are to build the stepper and DC motor circuits and to model the mounts for them. I also will mock up the launching mechanism with cardboard and finally get to test the exit velocity of the new DC motor.

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Logan Kojiro Weekly Status Report (3/13/21)

This week pending changes in hardware design I did further research into the Stanford ball shooting robots, the new parts we need for the DC motors, and got a lot of framing work done in software.  I wrote the serial input function to the Arduino and placeholder functions that will probably need some tuning of values for angle and velocity adjustment. I also ran through my derivation of the kinematics equations again that I did a while back to double check they were right before anything got put in software. For hardware testing, I dug up an old Arduino and motors I had from the fun with robots StuCo to get a preliminary test setup. Plus, it would be nice if these motors worked for us so we don’t have to order anything extra. JP also pushed a bunch of code earlier in the week that I’ve been looking through to make sure I understand what he’s doing as well. I need to dig out my Dremel tomorrow but I plan on doing some testing with using PWM straight on these motors to see what kind of velocity we can get out of them. If we can eliminate the need for an additional external power supply and only have a single one powering the Jetson, powering the Arduino and the motors that would be ideal to reduce the final footprint of the electronics in our project. With a light week of other coursework next week after emerging from midterm season, I’m exited that that hardware is starting to come together and am looking forward to seeing the

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Logan’s Weekly Status Report (2/20/2021)

Exploring this project more I’m excited to get working on it.  I spent this week working with everyone on the slides and doing some preliminary research/back-of-the-napkin math.  I am anxious about some of the mechanical construction challenges but fingers crossed we don’t run into any major problems.  I think that keeping our scope narrow we have a really interesting technical challenge and I can’t wait to see this robot come together.