Category: David’s Status Reports

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 worked with my team to finish securing all the motors and the electrical components to their appropriate locations within the structure of the vending machine. For example, I helped attach the motors themselves to the holes that Ashira had designed during the mechanical part. Some of the motors could be completely inserted inside of the holes but some could not be since if it was too tight of a fit, the movement would be restricted. Some of the motors had to be angled upwards also to prevent mechanical jamming. Additionally, I helped find a good position of the protoboard containing the voltage regulator on the side wall so that all the motors would move as inteneded. After that location was found, I helped glue that part to the side wall. I worked on making holes in the back wall of the vending machine so that wires and connectors that needed to be attached to external outlets could be passed through.

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

I believe I am currently on schedule since we as a team were able to finish all our MVP related tasks a few days before demo day.

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

For the next week, my focus will be working on the final video with my team and the final report with my team. 

 

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).

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.

 

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 worked with my team on the manufacturing of the structure of the vending machine. During class times, we went to TechSpark and I tried to assist with the laser cutting of the different pieces. Today, we as a team spent a lot of time assembling the structure from the laser cut parts, which included spending time securing pieces together with hot glue.

Individually, I worked on debugging the motor control issue that I had from last week – that the motors were turning as soon as the power was switched on and no program runs. I tried some different things but unfortunately wasn’t able to figure out the root cause. I had some tests where I would get different results each time without changing the setup, which makes us think this is a connection issue. 

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 a little bit behind schedule. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to figure out my issue with the motors, so that’s my task for the next week. My teammates may also be able to work with me on it since they made really good progress for their parts. 

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

I hope to fix the schematic and code for the motors so that when the power is turned on, no motors spin at all. Also when the code runs, the motors each move when they are supposed to and move with proper steps and direction.

 

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 worked on assembling the circuitry on the breadboard for the motor control schematic. Unfortunately, I believe I fried a few of the motor drivers due to not adjusting potentiometers correctly. At first, I wasn’t aware that the voltage regulator and motor drivers had potentiometers so that was a big mistake of mine. I also wrote the code for the motor control. I am currently running into an issue where the motor turns as expected when the program is running, but it also rotates when there is no program running. I am trying to debug that.

Additionally, I also helped out with researching ways to setup the SSH system for Raspberry Pi and the touchscreen with Anna and Ashira (this was the week prior to spring break).

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

I think my progress is slightly ahead of schedule, due to the fact that I was able to dedicate more time to work on the project over spring break since I had no other commitments. I am running into debugging issues (which should be expected for embedded systems related work) so I need to be able to fix those in order to remain on schedule.

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

This next week, my main focus is debugging the motor issue mentioned above where it moves as soon as power is turned on and no program is controlling it. I also plan to add more than 1 motor to the breadboard (hopefully all 6 required for our vending machine). Additionally, we as a team plan on manufacturing the structure of the vending machine (laser cutting the material).

 

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 researched how to interface all the peripherals with the Raspberry Pi. The peripherals include motors, LED, speaker, proximity sensor, and touchscreen. My focus was on the motors and how they are powered by a source and controlled by the Raspberry Pi. The motors will be powered separately from the Raspberry Pi source. Also, I worked on completing the motor control schematic. 

Additionally, we as a team researched and finalized our bill of materials. I helped with finding some of the exact items for the peripherals on external websites like Amazon and logged them on our spreadsheet

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

I believe that my progress is a little ahead of schedule. I have a rough draft of my circuit diagram already with all the peripherals, I just need to do some more research to ensure there are no obvious shortcomings with it. 

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

I hope in the next week that I am able to research options for motor control code and make some progress with that. I also would like to look more into the I2S speaker bonnet that we plan to use, and make sure all of my signals are connected correctly. 

 

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). 

A large part of this week for me was spent working with my team on the project proposal slides for our presentation. To that end, I mainly helped with the foundation for the technical challenges part of the presentation and the solution approach block diagram, and my teammates edited what I wrote to make it better.

I also tried to compile a bill of materials. We are currently leaning towards using a Raspberry Pi and purchasing those peripherals that correspond to the Raspberry Pi, including the raspberry pi touch screen and speaker that can be used with Raspberry Pi. We haven’t completely decided what type of proximity sensor we wanted as we need some way of detecting a person versus other objects.

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

At the moment I believe my progress is on schedule with respect to the Gantt chart we created as a team. I am making progress with the Bill of Materials and also currently researching different ways to implement the timer, motor control, and interfacing with the touchscreen. 

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

Hopefully in the next week, I can make enough progress with understanding of motor control that I can come up with a schematic or diagram about how the Raspberry Pi will control the 6 motors. I believe online resources such as Raspberry Pi forums and their website will provide me with good enough information about the process. Also, I’ve seen YouTube videos of people controlling motors with Raspberry Pi so I will review those in detail.