This week I’ve worked on implementing the software modules to control the radial and vertical aiming systems. I’ve ran into some roadblocks as I had a hard time connecting the Pi to the internet. We suspected that the issue is with the CMU Wifi as when I tried to connect using home wifi things worked out fine – we realized recently that we have to register the Pi’s MAC address to CMU-DEVICE, so we will try that in the future.
Another roadblock was that the Pi5’s ecosystem is too unstable. When Pi5 was released last October, the architecture changed significantly from Pi4, which made most of the stable packages that can interface with GPIO incompatible. Although we were able to find some libraries that work (like gpiozero), when tested on the servo the jitter was too much. We could implement the entire interface from scratch, but given the time constraints and the possibilities of more unanticipated issues, we’ve decided to use Pi4 instead for motor control – we’ve placed an order for this from the inventory.
I am slightly behind schedule as I was anticipating to finish writing all the software control modules by this week, but I hope to get back on track next week once I have the Pi4.
By next week, I plan to not only finish writing the software modules, but also to physically integrate both aiming system so we can demo the week following.
