This week I made a lot of progress. I spent Friday helping Varun fabricate parts for the robot arm. We should be able to complete the drive train parts in the next few days. I also finished the PCB design and will be able to order it ASAP once I confirm the parts are available on the website. I got a breadboard and tested my code from last week and it works; now that the code works the PCB was designed to work with this code. After we finish fabricating the rover in the next week we will be able to work on the kinematics; I have finished my research for the driving kinematics and I am currently looking into Wi-Fi communication between RPis so I can get that up and running after the rover is built.
Attached are some screenshots of the PCB and the code working for the controller:
This is the breadboard I used to confirm the design.
We are still behind on fabricating the rover, but once we have it created I believe it will be much easier for us to write meaningful code for the kinematics and debug it. We are on track to have a moving rover by the interim demo.
In order for things to be on track I need to purchase the drive train components by Wednesday and have all the other components 3D printed by then as well. I will also order the PCB ASAP because it might take a while to ship. I also need to confirm with other members of the group that we have purchased/acquired the RPis and the monitor to make sure we can get the controller side complete in the next two weeks.