Category: Alan’s Status Reports

This week and last week I did a decent amount of iteration and printing of the modules. Again, I forgot to take pictures of the 3D prints, but I think yall saw them at the interim demo.

picture of new lid with snappable feature.

John got the electronics to work in time for demo. Past demo, we decided to make the module body shorter since we didn’t end up needing all that space and it would have a nicer feel for the player. I also had to fix the module holder design since there was not really any way to properly insert the pogo pins in the current design (I don’t have a picture of that either, but I guess you’ll see it at demo or our weekly meeting).

I also laser cut a second controller so now we should have all the parts for everything necessary for final demo.

controller

 

For verification of the module designs, a lot of the physical requirements are pretty straight forward to test. The dimensions of the controller are guaranteed because I CADded the wood faces to meet those specs. The weight we will test by weighing the total of the controller panels and the arduino. I’m not entirely sure where to get a scale, but I don’t think it should be too hard to find one.

We will get be able to test some of the durability and ease of module swapping requirements when we actually get to play testing.

I redesigned the snaps on the lids so that they would be thinner and hence more flexible. Also with the upcoming interim demo coming up I added peripheral fit holes for each of the lids. I got all of these 3D printed and these turned out to work! I don’t have pictures of the 3D prints, but I guess you’ll see them at the demo. Here’s a quick screenshot of the new snap feature

I also laser cut out one of the panels for the controller. This also turned out decent, I think we need to glue it together, however. But for demo, it should be fine.

I think my progress is mostly on track now since we have working CAD models for everything and we have most of it actually printed. I think the only potential new things to be printed are we need 2 additional module holders and the laser cut controller. If we also do end up changing the module design for space/feel reasons, we would need to reprint those. But otherwise, everything seems functional.

Most of my time this week was spent on reiterating on the module design and also working on the ethics assignment for our team. The latter is self explanatory, so I won’t go into any detail for that.

I finally got the snap feature for our caps designed. I followed these youtube tutorials for guidance

This is a cross section of what our module and the holder design looks like after I made the changes in CAD.

As you can see, the top piece has been developed significantly and there is now a angled latch feature. Hopefully the margins are right for it to attach securely, but I guess we’ll see after printing. I also last minute added some impromptu ledges (those rectangle blocks halfway up) so that we can fit another protoboard. I think we might want to make the modules shorter, but I’m not sure how much we can without it getting too hard to physically configure the wiring of the electronics inside, since we need to do that by hand.

Otherwise, another change I made after seeing last week’s iteration printed out is make the holes for the pogo pins larger. Last time there was not enough margin to fit them in, hopefully it’s better now.

I’m still pretty behind schedule on module design, this is taking longer than I expected and waiting for a design to get printed before reiterating on the design to make any requisite changes is time consuming.

Next week, I plan on continuing to reiterate on the module design. I think we should be finalized on overall design, just need to see if any fixes need to be made after this gets printed. Next, I need to work on making specific arrangements so that each type of module can be inserted appropriately and stay there. That will likely take more trial and error.

Mostly I worked on redesigning the modules. We used some of the advice from Gloria and made a model with slanted walls. I also got it printed

It works better than the last print. There’s enough room to insert it somewhat comfortably. I fear there might be some issues in a more high pressured environment with fitting. I’m not sure how exactly to solve that, I think maybe rounding the edges might help. But I will discuss more with the rest of the team.

I next need to make the cap for the module. Right now it’s just a generic hole, but we want to make a cap that can be easily snapped on (for reusability purposes) and also we need to make the holes custom to the specific type of peripheral they will be housing.

Lastly, I made some more progress on the code (which can be seen on the github). These changes were mostly centered around the encoder but also a lot of actual integration efforts. We got to read actual inputs and test it with a sample protoboard that John made.

 

For next week, I want to finish the cap design (mentioned above) and then print out the laser cut walls for the controller. There are also some discussions I want to have about the sending the encoder values from the arduino, that I have been saving for an in-person discussion. I think we should get that finalized soon just so we can integrate the arduino with the unity game, since we do have the protoboard set up at least. Also, we need to do some work for the ethics assignment.

This week I decided on the electrical parts we needed for our modules and arduino connection and made purchase orders for them. We are getting a slide potentiometer for the speed. Rotary encoders for the shield and aiming. We will use potentiometers from CMU for the steering. And then buttons for battery and shooting.

On the hardware/software interface side, I started the arduino code. I’ve looked a bit into what arduino libraries we will need. I’ve also written out pseudocode for what our program will need to do and initialized a github repo for us to work on.

https://github.com/amabraha/c3-aquamods-arduino

For next week, there’s some design changes I want to make to the module’s 3d designs. I also want to make more progress on the arduino code.

This week I made some thought toward the module design. We have agreed on having 6-7 pins per module. One pin will be gnd, one pin will be Vdd, 3 pins will be designated as the identifier of the module via binary, and the last pin(s) will be for transmitting data from the module to the arduino.

I also made the order for 2 arduino leonardos. I have started some preliminary research on the peripherals needed for the modules. I found this potentiometer    that has infinite rotation but it requires two data pins. We also might look into encoders but those are not passive devices..