Ted’s Status Report for 04/18/2026

This week, I mainly focus on getting the rail system up and running now that we had the replacement parts needed. The design has been slightly modified as we are now using two motor drivers instead of one VESC, and I had to adjust the design of the pan camera mount accordingly. We’re still working on getting the motor tracking up and running, and hopefully by next week we can start implementing the panning motor tracking in tandem with our trucking motor movement. I also began some validation testing, such as measuring noise levels during operation and recording our trucking motor accuracy. Our project is currently behind schedule obviously, but after the whole fiasco with the broken motor controller we’ve made a pretty good pace on catching back up once our replacement parts arrived. For next week, I plan on helping Ahmad get the motor movement calibrated and finish implementing the subsystems together with Pareek’s accomplice and stageplay audio features, as well as testing and validating for our use case and design requirements. Overall, this project has been pretty fun to work on compared to other classes I’ve taken before at CMU. I’ve learned a lot about reading through documentation and ensuring that system parts are compatible before actual ordering and testing. I’ve also learned a lot about the VESC software systems, even though we couldn’t end up using the VESC motor controller in the end. A lot of this knowledge was acquired through learning about similar motor systems or projects people did in the past and learning from their mistakes and combined experience through online forums or write-ups. I also learned a lot about communication protocols such as UART, GPIO, and MODBUS, through similar methods of youtube videos, tutorials, and online forum posts. Learning more about my partner’s project parts was also very interesting, as I had never actually realized how UWB sensors or audio libraries like VOSK or word error rate functioned either. Most of the things I learned from these topics, I learned through talking with my group members and asking questions. Also, while not technical, our collaboration with Dr. Dueck and the School of Music also exposed me to a lot of musical and technical knowledge and terminology about opera and other music performances that I hadn’t known before, which I learned mainly through our collaboration meetings and the questions I was able to ask these talented and experienced performers.