I was able to finalize the BOM for the robotic arm and order parts. Currently waiting for parts to arrive. In the process of finalizing the BOM, I made a decision to use a single 3D printer driver board instead of 4 stepper motor driver boards separately. This choice enables us to zero the stepper motors using built in current sensing. Furthermore, it will simplify the robotic arm software because I can send Gcode commands in the form of XYZ coordinates over UART to move the motors. This way, I no longer have to do PWM in software simulaneously over 4 channels and also keep track of the motor position myself.
I also got some software work done: I wrote some skeleton code for sending Gcode commads over UART to the robot arm. As soon as I get back to campus from fall break, I can start assembling the robot and start trying to deploy the exisitng parts of the software stack.