What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
Two major things is done this week: 1. using hand to hold the motor to actuate the slider from last week, I identified that the best place to mount the motor is actually above the slider, not underneath like I expected. This is likely due to when motor is underneath, it also provides an upward force to the slider, causing it to jam with the pins more easily. Mounting the motor on the top can eliminate this non-horizontal force since the support for the slider is underneath. 2. Given this, I redesigned the whole actuator by allocating more space between the cover and the slider, I also designed and tested the motor mount, which at the moment does not work perfectly since their are some tolerance differences from the 3D printer, but I am confident that I can solve this tomorrow.
Is your progress on schedule or behind?
If compared to the original plan, which is to build 10x of these actuators and having with coordinate with each other, I am definitely behind. However, since the interim demo, we acknowledged that having one braille cell work perfectly is more important than building a ~70% working whole, and given the difficulties in this process is much bigger than we expected, we have scale down to that. And in this regard we are on schedule.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
A single braille cell working, shifting to different braille patterns.
Test that I am planning to run
After I get the braille cell working next week, I’ll focus on three major tests to make sure our product is meeting the original design requirement:
- activation speed: the slider should be able to move from one end to the other under 200ms.
- Jam frequency: the slider should not be jam in between at least 15 actuations (switching from one position to the next under the speed outlined in 1)
- Jam recovery: the actuator should automatically detect jam situation and recover from it using the back-and-forth motion in under 500ms.