Weekly Progress and Testing Plans
Harry and I spent about 30 hours this week building and testing the gantry system. We completed the hardware construction and testing of two sets of motor drives and belt drive systems. Currently, our motors can drive the manipulator to move smoothly. We encountered very many technical problems during the building process. First of all, our motor drive had the problem of insufficient torque at the beginning and could not drive the belt system during the actual system verification. I reduced the number of microsteps in the stepper motor drive from 6400 to 3200 and increased the drive voltage from 9V to 12V. We verified that this configuration could successfully drive the system by linking the motor to the belt and testing it with the whole gantry system.
We are still trying to test if we can control the end effector using the difference in speed and direction of rotation of the two motors because of a delay in the end effector part we 3D printed at Techspark.In the meantime, we have been verifying the charging of our wireless charging pads this week. We tested our 5W and 12W wireless charging modules as well as Apple’s original wireless charging module. The 12W charging module had the best results. We tested it on 3mm and 5mm acrylic boards, and with the 12W charging pad, we were able to charge a phone without a case on both thicknesses of acrylic boards very smoothly. For phones with cases, charging on 5mm acrylic requires a very tight fit between the phone and the charging pad. We will be printing out the charging plate pallets next week for the 5mm charging experiment to see if the 12W module can fully meet our needs. We plan to complete the gantry system to grab and release the charging pad next week and provide an API for the computer vision system to move the pad.