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.