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 rest of the motors to work. We consulted a TA to help us figure out why expanding the motor driver circuit to power all 6 motors kept giving us problems (burnt out components), and we deduced that it was probably due to the breadboard’s inability to handle the amount of current needed to power all 6 motors. We were advised to migrate the circuit to a set of protoboards to handle this issue, so throughout the second half of the week, Anna and I worked on soldering the motor drivers to their own protoboards. We were able to successfully test each of them one at a time on their own with the power supply/voltage regulator still coming from the breadboard and verify that they worked, but when we then moved the power supply onto its own protoboard and tried to spin the motors using the motor drivers again, they would jitter inconsistently and never respond to the motor control code. I’m thinking this might have been an issue with bad connections between the voltage regulator and protoboard, but when we measure the inputs and outputs between the regulator and drivers, their values were as expected. Just as we were debugging this, we also realized the RPi had turned off unexpectedly. We weren’t sure if this was a coincidence or a result of the potentially faulty regulator/driver connections, since the only thing that was connected between the regulator and RPi circuits was a singular ground pin, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to get the to RPi turn on again. After consulting the internet, it seems like we fried our RPi, since only one red light was blinking, indicating that the Pi wasn’t reading from the SD card. We were able to put in another purchase order for a new RPi 4 and are currently also borrowing an RPi 3 from Professor Benson in hopes of getting something to work before our final demo next week.
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 in pretty behind due to the unexpected setbacks we experienced. We’re probably going to put all our efforts this week yet again to rebooting our new RPi and trying to get back to where we were last week and hopefully have some motors moving.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
This upcoming week, my focus will be on getting the RPi to work with our original environment and get some motors to spin.
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?
Throughout this entire process, I was able to learn more about the RPi environment and how versatile it was in being able to support project like ours. I also found however, that integrating multiple peripherals was not as easy as it seemed. In the end, we were able to get each component working to some extent as needed for our project, but most of the issues would come in making them work altogether. Because of this, one of the skills I found myself developing the most was being able to identify a root cause. This not only took persistence, but also tested my understanding of how each component worked, since identifying a bug required me to identify discrepancies between an expected output and a real output. I was able to utilize forums and example tutorials which were posted online to help me with debugging, which in the end was what I think contributed the most to my learning. I also learned the importance of good time management, especially for a large project with a long timeline such as this one. Being able to accomplish what we had required lots of planning, communication across our team, and an ability to prioritize.