Risks:
Right now, our biggest risk is whether our power distribution plan actually works the way we expect. If it turns out our current approach isn’t sufficient, we’d need to revise the design and order new components, which could slow down full prototype integration. That said, this isn’t immediately blocking us. Most subsystems (UWB comms, microcontroller setup, UI work, etc.) can still be developed over USB power. Power becomes critical once we start integrating locomotion and running the full search stack, so we have some buffer before it affects system-level progress.
Design and Schedule Changes ?
No changes were made to the system design this week. All major revisions to our use case and corresponding design updates were completed last week, so we’re continuing forward with that finalized architecture.
Since there were no new design changes, our schedule remains the same heading into this week.
On the implementation side, we made solid progress. We got the ESP32-S3 devkit fully up and running in the ESP-IDF VSCode environment with clean build/flash/monitor workflows. Also, we figured out how to debug directly on the board using GDB, which will help a lot once we start diving into programming our robots. On the hardware side, we secured access to 2S LiPo batteries and selected voltage regulators for distributing power to different subsystems.
