This week’s theme is fabrication (and ethics)! I’ll break down my week in terms of the days-
Wednesday (evening) – I spent the evening finalizing the internals of the servo box. On Tuesday morning, I realized that my original plan for assembling the servo box was inefficient, which was to use a long M3 bolt with a captive nut on the other side of the box to hold it together. I realized that if I just used a heat-set insert on the top of the larger half, I could reduce the bolt size and therefore reduce the likelihood of any shear stress snapping the bolts in half.
Thursday (evening) – Most of the day was spent on the ethics assignment, but I also found the time to print and verify the fit of the servo first stage with the servo.
Friday (whole day) – During the first part of the day, I went to TechSpark and waterjetted the parts. We were intending to waterjet on both Monday and Wednesday during class, but there were people using the waterjet during the class time; the part would take too long and eat into the next class. I began waterjetting the part on Friday morning, and much to my annoyance, there were multiple hurdles within TechSpark to get the actual board cut out; however, with an hour-and-a-half delay, I finished cutting what will serve to be the base of the Rover!
Finally, Hayden and I went back to RoboClub, where our parts were 3D printing, and ironed out some imperfections with the board. (there were some holes that for some reason hadn’t been cut out by the waterjet, and the nature of the material had created some imperfections that affected the way the board sat on the table.) The rest of the day was spent printing out the rest of the parts, and one-by-one verifying that they would fit together. Here they are! (the third stage is printing as I write this). I’ll be assembling the arm tomorrow.
We are still behind, but if we finish the arm by tomorrow (as planned), we can make up time next week (by expediting Rover manufacturing and doing integration earlier than anticipated.) By next Sunday, the physical Rover needs to be done. In my downtime, I’ll be working on verifying motor encoder functionality.