This past week was spent designing and implementing upgrades for the manipulator hardware. The linear bearings arrived, so I made a mount to fit them and used M5 screws, spacers, and nuts to accommodate them. The motion is very smooth and stable, but the thicker mount takes up the majority of the 1.5″ clearance the current screws allow. I’ll swap out the screws with 3″ long ones this upcoming week.
The electronics housing is the other piece I’ve been working on. The current design ought to work: it fits the microcontroller and DC air pump inside of a 3D-printed shell that clicks together and can be screwed onto one of the T-channels that make up the manipulator.
Functionally, the manipulator is fine. This last bit of upgrades should give us the full capabilities we planned for. After this, most of my time will be spent helping the others improve the image processing or user interface.
On learning new knowledge: I started using a new CAD software called OnShape during this project, which had a bit of a learning curve but ended up being faster and easier to use than SolidWorks. I found it was easiest to keep a tab with the documentation open while working so I could quickly find solutions for any problems I had. I also got to learn a lot about the math behind our computing of normal maps, height maps, and 3D objects. Most of this was learned from Yon explaining it and our group reading through the relevant papers together.