Category: Ted’s Status Reports

This week, I’ve mainly been working on ironing out any small design issues with the physical rail system and tuning/calibrating the motor system. We had an issue where the replacement motor driver for the previously broken motor driver also arrived broken (hooray) but we managed to procure a replacement as fast as possible and am working on tuning right now. I’ve also started working on the poster and final report just to save time, and will hopefully be meeting with our SOM collaborators to record a demo with our working product. The main thing to focus on now is the motor tuning so we can capture accurate video for our video demo and our collaboration. The main concern we have now is finishing our motor movement fine tuning so we can have a presentable project before both demo days. At this point schedule isn’t really relevant, we’re just focusing on getting it done as fast as possible.

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.

This week, I worked on connecting the VESC motor controller to the BLDC motors and power source. I mainly focused on CADing (is that the right acronym?) the 3d driver pulleys, idler pulleys, motor plates, and other miscellaneous things and printed them before our meeting Saturday. Then, I hooked up the motors to the VESC, power source, and RPi and tested them to see if all the connections had been soldered correctly and were functioning. Bearings have been delivered, but I wasn’t able to pick them up before the ECE office closed. I’m hoping to pick them up and finish constructing the rail monday, and then begin testing with our completed UWB sensor/node system. In terms of schedule, we’re developing most of our subsystems at the same time, and once the rail is finished and all parts are received, we should be at a good pace. I need to reprint some of the pulleys for a better fit on the timing belt, and I hope to get that done by next week as well. I want to reduce wear and tear as much as possible. The open source configuration software for the motor controller is a bit finicky to work with, and I’m trying to get experienced with it as fast as possible.

This week, we were mainly focused on finishing the design report before break. I mainly worked on the testing requirements and other miscellaneous sections, while collaborating with the rest of my group mates for the system implementation and architecture sections. I also ordered most of the parts needed for the physical rail assembly, as I’m hoping to buy the plywood needed from Techspark. I finished researching what type of motor specifications we would need, and also met with Dr. Dueck and our SOM collaborators to get some important feedback that would be helpful for our design. The feedback from our collaborators included questions about ideal placements of our UWB nodes, languages used in singing, possible coordination in script and camera movements, preference over camera focus, and preference on camera shift count. I’ve also begun designing some pulley and gears we might need for our belt design in CAD, and should be ready to print them out according to schedule. We are still on schedule, and I hope to begin the physical construction of our rail before next week once all parts are ordered and delivered. We are slightly behind schedule, but that’s mainly due to the fact that we forgot about spring break when designing our schedule. Our slack time makes up for this, and we should still be on track with some extra slack time left in case there are any other delays.

This week, I kept working on the physical design of the rail and helped develop our design presentation, as well as any final major design decisions we planned on using. I’m still waiting to meet with Dr. Dueck and the students we’ll be collaborating with on Wednesday, so I can finalize the dimensions for whatever studio we plan on testing with. We are still on schedule, only thing is that we are slightly delaying our ordering schedule so that we can first meet with Professor Qing Li and Dueck to ensure that our design is satisfactory. As we are going to be waiting a little longer to order parts, but it shouldn’t affect our team operations too much, as we are working on other aspects of the design, like my CAD model, in parallel to any plans we had for development with physical parts. I’m beginning to finalize power calculations, as well as determine what type of motor reductions we might need to include to ensure the motors don’t burn out after 3-4 hours of continuous use.  In the next week, I hope to get feedback from our collaborators and advising professors/TAs to adjust CAD designs accordingly, as well as finalizing component orders so we can begin physical implementation.

This week, I’ve been working on our design presentation and finalizing our physical rail design. I’ve been working on interfacing our motor control with the RPi, using a VESC motor controller usb-c connection to communicate with and control the DC motors. Depending on compatibility with other modules, we might swap to using motor drivers instead for movement. We are thinking about a three motor system with each motor assigned for lateral movement, one for pivoting, and one for tilting. We are currently still on schedule, with design finalization expected to be done by next week after the design presentation and report. I’m hoping to finish a CAD diagram of the physical system before the next status report to have a clear and easily editable design that my team can use for info. I’ve started design on the physical implementation, and am hoping to experiment more and finetune once we order and receive parts.

This week, I collaborated with my other group members on the proposal presentation and worked together to go over what components we might need. I ordered a RPi from the ECE inventory for micro controller needs such as possible audio processing, as well as a motor controller, and am currently still working on physical rail design and motor integration. I’m trying to figure out how to implement the phone mount and rail system, whether it be through a track/wheel mechanism or a line drawn pulley type design. I am still currently on schedule, and I aim to come up with a finalized design and present it to my other group members before the end of next week, as well as go over their possible ideas for what libraries they might be using for their audio/computer vision modules.