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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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Team Status Report 3/20/21

This week we did a lot of finalizing of our design and reorganized our schedules and goals for the project. We coordinated more about how we want our final external housing to look like and how the camera will be attached. Additionally we have what should be close to our final parts list for the main components. The only things we have left to order are any parts we need for the construction of the final housing. In order to complete our design review, we finalized our communication protocols and all got on the same page detail wise about how the code will communicate and where it will all live. We also did a big parts order. Additionally, we started getting code running on the Jetson. For the launcher, as a team we went over a few design ideas and how it should match our requirements. We discussed if we should rescope to have a user drop in a ball, but decided that that would go against the requirement of facilitating a fully automatic game. We don’t think it should hold every ball it needs (this might be a lot of balls), but that it should definitely have some kind of hopper for storage. Following this, we went through a couple different hopper designs, some motorized and some not motorized. Our initial hopper prototype this week we decided will just be a tube attached to a funnel fed to the launcher at an angle. It requires no motors and we hope that it will allow only one ball at a time  to be launched if we time the DC motor actuation well. Having to design our own launching mechanism kind of threw us for a little bit of a loop, but with parts on the way we think we are in a better place again.