This week was mainly spent integrating everything together with Ethan and Alejandro. I finalized all of the physical components of the gantry, and created a mount for the camera which sits high above the gantry. I also wrote the code that translates the pixel values of the centroids of the objects into the step distances that the motors need to travel. Due to difficulty getting the software that interfaces with the camera to work, I decided to switch from using the stereo camera to get depth to a time of flight sensor attached to the end-effector. I’ve written some code so that the gantry now stops when the distance sensor is a certain distance away, which is close enough that the end-effector is able to suck the object onto the suction cup.
I plan to finish integration and complete testing/verification next week. I am currently behind schedule.
As you’ve designed, implemented and debugged your project, what new tools or new knowledge did you find it necessary to learn to be able to accomplish these tasks? What learning strategies did you use to acquire this new knowledge?
Strangely enough, I became very familiar with the physical electrical components of the system, such as the stepper motor drivers and the vacuum pump/relay. As ECE majors in CMU, we don’t often have much experience with designing actual circuitry. Luckily, there are lots of tutorials online that explain how these these components work. I learned how to use the vacuum pump and the CNC shield from tutorials on YouTube, since they give a lot of surrounding information that is often cut out of the “How-to” pages on forums or maker websites.