This week I spent most of the time gathering information on the power requirements of our design, and started considering mechanical design elements as well. For power I was originally planning to have separate buses at 2 or 3 different voltages, but decided to have a single 12V supply that powers both the Jetson and the stepper driver, and get power for the LIDAR and USB cameras via Jetson USB. I also ordered the stepper motors we’ll be using for the project, and explored a Roomba CAD model that I will design around.
Currently I’m slightly behind schedule on the mechanical bin design since I didn’t allocate time for developing the power system. With the Roomba acquired I’ll be much faster at designing the docking mechanism in CAD, so I plan to catch up this week. This isn’t a major issue since I have a week of slack built into the hardware development.
In the next week, I’m targeting having the bin attachment complete, and also having the Roomba attachment designed and possibly fabricated. I’ll need to ether leave room for or integrate the electronics mounts as a part of the docking mechanism.
Courses used for my design portion: 18-021, 18-100, 18-220, 24-104. The analysis for power was not too complex, but just had to reason through the ratings for our various components. Knowing how to use GPIO (Jetson) to drive larger items (steppers) came from non-work experience.