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).
I personally didn’t have as much time this week to work on the vending machine due to large projects in other classes as well. But for the time I did have, I spent the majority of it trying to get the motors to work all together. I spent Monday in class working on debugging the motors one by one. I did this by disconnecting all the other motors and also their corresponding motor drivers from the 12V and 5V power sources. This was a great way of seeing which motor drivers worked and which were burnt, so we were able to substitute the burnt motor drivers with working new ones. However, there were still a lot of issues with interference between the motors and drivers, and I still failed to get all 6 motors to work as expected. My teammates worked on using soldering drivers to protoboards instead of using breaboards to ensure stable connections later on in the 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 is pretty behind because I still have not gotten all 6 motors integrated into the vending machine. I will need to help my team with the integration of the motors as much as possible.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
This upcoming week, my focus will be trying to get SSH for the new RPi to work and hopefully work with my team to install the new motors into the vending machine structure with my team after they all work with the program and protoboards.
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?
I learned a lot from my teammates about debugging strategies. To be honest, I am really bad at debugging in general, so my teammates contributed significantly to our collective effort to debug the motors. They taught me embedded systems debugging strategies for breadboards and electrical components like isolating the problem (in our case disconnecting all other motor drivers and motors from the power rails) and proper unit testing (such as when one motor driver works at a certain voltage with a certain pin, use that same pin and voltage to test a separate motor driver).