Posted on

Team Status Report for 4/12/25

What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready? 

The most significant risk at this point would probably be in getting the motors to work, since the functionality of our entire system relies on our motors being able to work on command and actually vending snacks when needed. Currently, we’re having trouble getting all 6 motors to work in parallel; the max we’ve been able to control all together is 3 motors. We’re dealing with this road block by putting all our efforts this week in getting the motors to work. We’re thinking of buying more motor drivers in case we end up burning out  the ones we currently have and also potentially purchasing a motor shield, which is something we realized could be a better option to use. We also are working on getting our new PIR sensor up and running, since we only made the new sensor change and got it in late last week.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward? 

No notable changes were made in the design of the system.

Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred. This is also the place to put some photos of your progress or to brag about a component you got working.

Posted on

Ashira’s Status Report for 4/12/25

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week, I mainly focused on getting the speaker and motors to work. I started working on debugging the speaker system, picking up on where David and Anna had left off earlier and checked all the connections between wires, as well as the code and packages which were in the environment. With Anna’s help, we were able to clean up some of the connections between the RPi and speaker bonnet, which in the end is what seemed to help up us get the speakers working. I then moved onto developing the code to get the speaker to play sounds on command, since that is what our system will need to do. Eventually, all we needed to end up doing is downloading pygame and using their libraries to play .mp3 sounds. However, we ran into a bug with the RPi config file, which prevented the RPi from producing sound when the pygame code was run. We eventually realized that our config file was missing a line of code which was what was responsible for actually enabling audio output on the RPi. We still need to integrate this with the rest of our code, but we decided that getting all the motors to work would be the priority at this point.  Once we got this working, I spent the remaining time working on helping David debug the motors. I worked with Anna to rewire the motors on the breadboards to see ach connection more clearly, but after connecting the motors, and running our code which we had previously been able to use to spin two motors, none of them ended up working anymore. I’m wondering if it might be a result of fault connections or motors drivers entirely, since we’ve been having lots of issues with these motors drivers specifically. We have yet to finish debugging, but once this functionality is working, all we’ll need to do is integrate and we should be good to go in terms of our MVP functionality.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule? 

My progress is on schedule with our original Gantt chart we made.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This upcoming week, my focus will be on getting all 6 of the motors to work during the first half of the week and then hopefully integration during the second half.

Posted on

David’s status report 4/13/25

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week, I was still focused on integrating all 6 motors. I spent a lot of time reorganizing the wires, since our setup during the progress demonstration day was an absolute mess. This involved moving 3 of the motors to a third breadboard and shortening the wires so that they don’t get tangled up. We ended up having 3 breadboards where each contained 2 motor drivers. Then I tried to isolate the motor drivers one by one and debug them. This means using the same working combination of RPi GPIO pin and motor on each of the motor drivers to see which ones were faulty. We had to replace a few bad motor drivers but ultimately still haven’t achieved full integration of the 6 motors.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule? 

I would say my progress is behind schedule since the motors are the most important part of our team project MVP and I still haven’t been able to fully integrate them with the rest of the system due to issues above.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

As a team, we ran into setbacks with bad breadboards (such as rails that may have been burnt out) and really faulty motor drivers, so I plan to work together with Ashira in debugging the motor drivers one by one and finishing the integration of the motors.

 

Posted on

Anna’s Status Report for 4/12/25

This week, I focused on setting up and testing the passive infrared sensor. I explored multiple approaches to verify its accuracy, but unfortunately, I haven’t fully resolved the issue yet. Initially, I connected the sensor directly to the GPIO pins and printed “detection” based on the PIR’s state. However, this approach produced frequent false positives. In response, I researched alternative methods—experimenting with both the gpiozero and RPi.GPIO libraries, changing conditionals, sensitivity and timeout parameters, and even incorporating a LED diode that lights up upon detection. Despite these efforts, the false positives persisted regardless of how much I changed it. I suspect the issue may be related to the sensor’s sensitivity and timing, which I plan to debug further.

Outside of the PIR, I successfully helped Ashira get the speakers to produce sound by adjusting the wiring—this involved some frustrating debugging, but we eventually resolved it. I also assisted David with the motors by suggesting that lowering the Vref on the motor drivers could help achieve the expected rotation, which thankfully worked. Additionally, I reorganized the motor circuitry, consolidating it from 3 breadboards to 1 with Ashira.

Although I’m currently a bit behind schedule due to the PIR sensor not being integrated yet, I plan to go into the lab tomorrow to continue debugging. Hopefully, by next week, motion detection will be more reliable and we can move forward with integration.