This week as well as part of the last was the final push for completing CAD designs as well as IMU debugging/integration. Starting with the IMU I had some pretty bad circumstances to overcome. When coming in to tune the current 9-DoF LSM9DS1, I found that the RPi was not able to talk to it over I2C like it was previously. I tried to debug the hardware for hours over 2 days but nothing was working and I came to the conclusion that the board must have failed somehow maybe due to a short but I never came to a definitive answer. Given the short deadlines an also that that particular breakout board was out of stock from Adafruit I had to quickly pivot. Luckily enough I remembered I had some leftover boards from a previous course/project which combined had all the sensors I needed to compute absolute orientation. So I reworked all the code to work with the new boards as well converting the system to use interrupts to remove polling from the code. After some additional testing I was able to get the tolerance to ~1 deg.
In the past week the CAD was fully finished in terms of the umbrella assembly and the parts were 3D printed. The design as mentioned later ended up being much more complicated than initially anticipated and required ordering additional hardware to make work. With the design I also 
tried to optimize it for 3D printing meaning minimizing overhangs.
Due to my delays in finishing the design I have been slightly behind where I would have liked to be in terms of building the umbrella assembly out with enough time for testing.
Next week will be left for any additional testing/validation that needs to occur before the Final Demo. Due to falling behind schedule in areas, particularly when it came to the assembly mechanical design. Particularly, I just haven’t had much time to consider the ingress protection of the parts. Due to either failures or other things I will likely design 3D print new revisions hopefully with parts that we can fully test for the standards we would like to hit for our use-case requirements.
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?
We recognize that there are quite a few different methods (i.e. learning strategies) for gaining new knowledge — one doesn’t always need to take a class, or read a textbook to learn something new. Informal methods, such as watching an online video or reading a forum post are quite appropriate learning strategies for the acquisition of new knowledge.
Definitely the hardest learning curve was working with Fusion360. I chose the software over Solidworks (which I have worked briefly with previously) because I perceived it as being easier to use and simpler. I have also had limited experience using it, but the design requirements of the project required me to quickly gain experience with it. The biggest help in the process was looking at free released other 3D models with similar design goals to gain inspiration, as well as lots of youtube videos. I definitely learned a lot, and there is still a lot I would like to improve, although the timeline of the project did not afford much wiggle room.