Author: Reuben Foo

26/07/2019 

Agenda: 

• 3D printing of robot parts
• Solve any unforeseen circumstances

  

Task accomplished:  

• Printed component holders for robot (RPi, PoE adapter + USB hub, buck & boost converter)
• Started print job for robot casing
• Re-soldered and heat shrunk any loose wires 
• Discovered that the code to turn servo motor is not working well and attempt to solve by recoding 

 

Today, we asked Tony to help us with the printing of our robot casing which was necessary considering how messy and dangerous our wires were without a casing. Due to the sheer size of the print, we needed to use the Builder Extreme 2000 printer, which required Tony’s assistance and permission.

3D design of casing and electronic holders

 

While waiting for the long print, we re-soldered and heat shrunk any loose wires or connections. At the same time, we continued stress testing the robot and realised that the code to turn the servo motor by extracting signal strength is not working well as sometimes the transceiver ends up facing a direction that is not the direction of the highest signal strength. We had to change the code several times but had not managed to overcome this problem.  

After the casing was printed, we mounted all the electronics on the tank and you will get to see how our robot looks like on our last post next week! 🤭 🧐 🤓

25/07/2019 

Agenda: 

• Settle servo motor wires
• 3D printing of holders and casing for robot

  

Task accomplished:  

• Crimping and testing of DIY RJ45 cable for the slip ring
• Soldering and heat shrinking of jumper cables to remaining slip ring wires for IMU
• Started prints for component holders (switch, camera and secondary platform)

 

In the morning, Rachel made a trip to Sim Lim Square to procure an RJ45 wire crimper and wire tester for our group (after many valiant attempts of self-sourcing them)! 🤩

 

RJ45 cable tester and wire crimper

 

Since the slip ring comes with 18 individual wires as shown previously, we would need to crimp 8 of them to DIY our own LAN cable to insert into the client transceiver (rotary side) and switch (stationary side). We only managed to get the wires to work after multiple failures, even though we had 3 people performing the task 😅😅

Finally getting the crimp right!

 

At night, we then attached 5 male jumper wires to the stationary side of the slip ring, and 5 female jumper wires to the rotary side, for connection between the RPi and the IMU. We also started several 3D prints for holders to secure the components in our tank.