These past two weeks I have focused on improving the user experience. I found a monitor and have connected it to the Raspberry Pi. Nathan and I are still trying to find a way to transmit the camera feed back to the monitor but we could just directly SSH into the rover RPi if it comes down to it. I also spent this week redoing the PCB to make it have better keys and I made it more like a controller. I also designed a user terminal that will hold the battery and the Rpi/monitor and allow the user to adjust the angle. On top of this I have spent countless hours with Varun rebuilding the rover and testing it to make sure it still works every time we redo the electronics. I also have crafted some beautiful slides for our final presentation on Monday.
Here are some photos of the new PCB design, the current setup and the CAD for the new terminal I have designed.
We are very much on track to finish things; I do not need to modify the timeline at all, I just need to focus and get the deliverables done.
In the next week I will keep helping Varun calibrate the rover as I have been doing and figure out how to get the video feedback.
As I’ve been designing my side of the project I have had to improve my physical CAD skills with Fusion 360 to be able to create a fully integrated design. I also found it necessary to learn about new libraries in Python and learn about serial and socket communication methods. I have spent a lot of time reading data sheets and library documentation to be able to get a thorough understanding of what is happening in our design and figuring out how to debug it. The learning strategy that has proved to be the most effective has been reading these documents and then trying to implement the concepts into our design and then use previous knowledge to debug.