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
Juan Pablo Status Report 3/5/21
Spent some time learning about the Jetson nano and the interactions with the Arduino. I have also been looking into how to best implement the UI and have made potential models that should be easy to interact with. The UI will ideally help the user correct any issues that occur and so my goal is to make it as accessible and useful as possible. I’ve also been thinking about a possible method of lining up shots that would not only be based on absolute coordinates, but also on relative distance to another cup that has already been made. Hopefully this could come into play if we encounter any accuracy problems in the future.
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.