Ted’s Status Report for 04/04/2026

This past week, I’ve been working on finalizing the rail design. Unfortunately, one of our gt2 pulleys broke during assembly, so we’ve been a little delayed in getting the pivoting motor movement up and functional. I spent this week mainly focusing on getting the rail system up and running, by finishing any possible parts we would need cut/soldered/printed. We also had a micro-usb port break on the VESC motor controller while soldering, and I’m currently working on a backup plan for firmware installation and communication in case we can’t get that fixed. I’ve been working on creating some jst-ph style connections for communication from the VESC to our GPIO pins using female dupont connectors on our RPi. I’ve also begun working on some rudimentary motor control code using a GPIo communication library with our motor controller for simple lateral movement to ensure that all our connections have been soldered correctly with no major issues that’d require disassembly down the road, which would require a lot of time and wasted effort. For verification testing, as mentioned above, I plan on first writing some motor movement code to test that our VESC to RPi communication protocols are working correctly, and then using test inputs to simulate UWB sensor communication and ensure that the rail system is moving how it’s supposed to. Noise level requirements will be tested using a decibel meter that will positioned at different locations during motor testing to ensure that our noise level is below our specified amount. Once replacement parts have been procured and our VESC repaired, I hope to get our full system up and running so we can start testing with our other subsystems and the opera students. For now, I plan to write some simple test code and fix any issues that might arise from that and hopefully have a complete system before next week.