All our parts came in! (minus H-Bridge) With the parts in hand, it is much easier to come to a complete arrangement of what our system will look like.
This post will give a play by play of each components update, here’s the electrical chart again for reference:
Physical Connections:
Battery Connections: While RoboClub had batteries, we need to connect them to the rest of our system. First step is getting some wires with female tamiya connectors. the Tamiya blocks were available in RoboClub, but I had to strip and crimp some wires to them for us. See below. (While we don’t need all of these right now, it felt inefficient to just do one and leave the rest as a task for later)
The next step plan for each of these is to t/y-split them into their own step down and H-Bridge components. H-Bridge isn’t here as needed, so we will do that later. No impact to critical path.
LiDAR Connections: Cord was provided in the purchased kit. They easily plug into the ESP pins.
IMU: the LiDAR pack had extra wires displayed, so I had initially hoped I would be able to repurpose them, but unfortunately we cannot, as the LiDAR is SPI compatible, which means it has extra wires and is not a purely I2C connector with only 4 (doesn’t fit into the IMU plug). Therefore I need to make new wires.
UWB: UART connection to the ESP is being handled by Brooks, seems to be going well.
H-Bridge: Problem was caught upon closer inspection of this choice once I had all our parts in hand. Our current option takes 5V for it’s control input, which is problematic for our ESP 3.3V option. This does not impact critical path, as other components have sufficient work to complete amidst reordering.
Drivers:
Battery: No drivers needed for battery connections.
LiDAR / IMU: Drivers will have to be made by us (me lol), I2C protocol will use a library for data package delivery and initialization.
UWB: Again, Brooks is largely doing this.
H-Bridge: Pivot to new component means we can’t do this yet, but it will need a driver.
Housings:
While considerations have been made (and standoffs/screws acquired for some components from RoboClub), I believe it best to have our electronics working and wired before I build housings for them. Evidence of this being a good decision already is our H-Bridge change. While components are very unlikely to change now (I am fairly confident we won’t), I would like to evaluate things like how far the LiDAR can actually see for position and placement considerations.
Next Steps:
Our critical path is getting strained. I anticipated this, and as Adrian has limited work he can do before this is done (and is the subject to which this strain effects), I have asked Adrian to help with the effort of this integration.