Team A8: Pongpal

Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone, Spring 2024 Simon Lee, Alex Kireeff, Michael Bahner

Tag: status report

Seung Yun’s Status Report for 2/17
Posted by : seungyul Seung Yun's Status Reports

This week, I finalized prototyping the vertical and radial aiming system in SolidWorks. Attached are the rendered images of the prototype.

In addition to prototyping, I’ve placed the order for the motors needed for each system. For the radial aiming, we’re using this motor, and for the vertical aiming, we’re using this servo motor. Both motors were selected based on high torque it provides. The radial aiming system is the same as the design that we originally had, but the vertical aiming was completely redesigned after our meeting with Prof. Fedder – the design that uses servo aligns with our design goals or precise angular control more closely, while also achieving it at a much lower cost (the linear actuator with long range was around $100, while this servo motor is only $15).

Moreover, I will be presenting for our team for next week’s design presentation, so I’ve been working on absorbing the design details of the other subsystems of our project, and have been practicing my presentation as well.

I am still on schedule. The goal was to finish prototyping this week and start construction of both systems next week, so once all the parts are delivered, I will start laser cutting individual parts and assembling them to see if they work as intended.

For next week, I plan on constructing at least one of the subsystem’s prototype and see if they work as intended. If it doesn’t I will have to iterate on different design.

Team Status Report for 2/10
Posted by : seungyul Team Status Reports

This week, we presented our Proposal Presentation to the class and received feedback. The overall feedback was positive, with constructive criticism to be addressed, such as the camera pole impacting the portability, and having different testing environments to make our CV algorithm more robust.

After the presentations, we focused on drilling down on the initial design as we prepare for the Design Presentation. For example, we started asking questions such as “what is the minimum torque that we need for the stepper motor?”, “How many frames of images can we capture in the ball’s trajectory, and is that enough to assess where the ball will land?” As we start to consider these questions, we are starting to have a specific technical requirements for the parts we will order.

We are also approaching individual subsystems with an iterative improvement in mind. For example, Mike will be focusing on making the website and communication protocol functioning first before jumping into Figma. Alex is starting with assumptions such as “no other objects moving except for the ball” to hone in the ball trajectory calculation algorithm first, then slowly remove the assumptions to perfect the ball landing detection. Seung Yun is considering the pros and cons of fish-line design and linear actuator design for the vertical aiming, and how quickly we can go from one design to the other in case the first one doesn’t pan out.

Alex Status Report 2/10
Posted by : akireeff Alex's Status Reports

Time breakdown for this week:

  1. Mandatory in class time (4h)
  2. Design Slides (4h)
  3. Basic Ball Detection (4h)

This week I worked on design slides for a couple hours with my group on Saturday. We started working on finalizing all the designs and we began making some of the slides for the design review.

On Friday night, I worked on doing basic ball detection. I have a couple videos that I could upload, but wordpress says “Sorry, this file type is not permitted for security reasons.” I found that the ball detection is fairly difficult to do on its own (even when I am assuming that the ball will be the only thing moving in the frame) and have decided to get a LIDAR+Camera to help with this. The LIDAR+Camera combination will allow us to get a depthmap that the camera can use and should greatly simplify the detection code while making it simple to estimate the ball position.

Michael’s Status Report for 2/10/24
Posted by : mbahner Michael's Status Reports

This week my goal was to layout the groundwork for the website we will be hosting for to control our machine. I  have been working on the design presentation on today. We spent 4 hours working on the design slides. Earlier this week I practiced presenting for 1 hour, as I presented our proposal.  I went to the presentations on Monday and Wednesday and got to see a lot of cool projects.

I also spent 4 hours working on the website this week. For laying out the groundwork, I started by setting up a react project. I had worked with react a bit in the past, but I’m still relearning a lot of the ins and outs of creating websites. Eventually I created a baseline project with core UI components and a basic CSS sheet for styling. Besides setting up the website, I have been researching how to dynamic DNS connections for when we get the raspberry pi next week. Given that the IP we are using is dynamic and going to change, I’ve decided to use DDNS as a workaround.  I have found softwares that can connect to DDNS, like ddclient software. This software can update the DNS of the raspberry pi when the IP of the network changes so it can maintain connection to the site.

 

Seung Yun’s Status Report for 2/10
Posted by : seungyul Seung Yun's Status Reports

This week, I focused on prototyping the vertical aiming system and the radial aiming system. The feedback we got from the proposal presentation didn’t have major concerns with the mechanical portion of the design, so I started designing on Solidworks. We plan to build the robot’s scaffold to be laser cut from a 3/16″ thickness hardboard.

During the design, I’ve noticed that I would need the dimensions of the motors as a baseline, so I’ve also done some research on the parts we will use. For the radial aiming system, we’d need a stepper motor. The parameters that’s relevant for the purpose of radial aiming is low step angle for precise control, and high torque as lots of weight will be on the lazy susan base. The price has to be reasonable, and the speed of the motor is not relevant for our purpose. We came across this motor that meets the requirements, so we plan on placing the order for this part soon.

The the vertical aiming, we are still debating between using a linear actuator or using another stepper motor and using a string to coil to control the PVC pipe. We plan on fleshing out this design sometime next week as we prepare for the design proposal presentation, and order the necessary parts.

We are ahead of the schedule according to the Gantt chart, and by next week I plan to have a fully fleshed-out Solidworks design and have all the necessary parts ordered.