Currently, work on the manipulator hardware is on schedule. The newest 3D-printed mount slides up and down the manipulator smoothly, though it remains to be seen how well it will function when accommodating objects of different thicknesses. All that’s left for the manipulator is the stepper-suction adapter, which Theo plans to finish by this week. We won’t need to cut the stepper motor’s axle if we make the adapter longer, so we should be able to avoid accidentally damaging the internals of the stepper motor.
One new risk that came up this week is that the scanner API is having trouble running on our Mac. We found sources online that claim they’re able to make it work, but we’ve run into several issues so far. We did make some progress on this front and hope to be able to get it to work, but we may have to sacrifice mac compatibility if the issue persists, which would be unfortunate. This does not impact our schedule or our block diagram, but it could affect our benchmarks by excluding compatibility with mac systems.