These past two weeks I’ve spent the majority of my time verifying the design and touching up the CAD so we will be able to hit the ground running after Spring Break with fabrication of our rover. I spent probably about 8 hours alone confirming our design and finding sources for our design proposal report. As far as progress, I have not been able to work on the physical fabrication our experimentation parts because I was ill the week prior to Spring Break and then I have been out of town. However, while working on our design report submission I confirmed the ability of our design to drive, lift items properly, and receive data from the encoder on the servos at a high enough rate to have the amount of control we would like.
Additionally, I finally had the time to write some Arduino code and I was able to get the analog button presses to translate to outputs from the Arduino. Here is the basic code I was able to write with the help of one of our design sources.
Looking at the schedule I am pretty much on task as far as design; nevertheless, I am very far behind as far as fabrication. This week Varun and I plan on using the water jet to create our bottom plate and we will be able to keep 3D printing components. Once, we order the final components of the drive train we will be able to assemble the entire rover and the only part we will have left is integration. We were very optimistic in believing that we could fabricate the entire rover before break but now that our design is set in stone I believe we will be able to get caught up in the next two weeks. Kinematics is still in the works and I need to put a lot more effort into the coding aspect of the project now that the CAD is finalized. This next week I will finish the entirety of the 3D printed drive train modules and I will finalize a PCB so I can order one and begin debugging ASAP.