Learnings and Issues

• Software - There are threading issues with the servo motor. When we run the servo motor code independently on the Pi as a python program, the servo motor fires up with no issue. However, when we run servo motor as a part of an integrated service with Flask, servo motor never files. We believe this is due to servo motor only able to run on the main thread. We have plans to refactor our program into 3 separate components - flask server, a work queue, and independent workers that run servo motor on the main thread.
• Hardware - Designing hardware takes forever. Tolerances need to be checked and double checked. Materials need to be sourced. Material sourcing and manufacturing tolerances took up a large chunk of our time and caused the design of various parts to go through many iterations.
• 3D printing is annoying and takes time. Our product failed during demo day due to an issue with the PLA plastic that the carousel was made from melting from the heat of the stepper motor, which failed to go to sleep due a test script that was pre-maturely exited. The print for the carousel took 26 hours, so we did not have time to make a second print or backup.