Week 9: October 24 30 - ngetachew/Portfolio GitHub Wiki

The focus of this past week was getting the DeltaArm to work. The first problem was that the homing function wasn't working. However, after I changed it to use the goUntilPress function, it started working properly. The next step was changing the code in the set_single_position_steps function(this will probably be renamed because I have no idea why it is called this). The code for this is shown below.

The problem we are having is translating the positions passed into set_single_position_steps into what's outputted by getPosition(). That being said, that is a problem that we decided to solve at another time, and instead focus on other problems.

We added functionality to DeltaArm that allows us to control the solenoid and motor attached at the intersection of the three arms. This can be seen in the __init__() function supplied above. The solenoid requires a library called Adafruit_PCA9685 to be downloaded. Luckily, we installed it using sudo apt-get. After this, we tested the stepper motor that rotates the game piece. We found that the gear used to rotate it had messed up teeth, so the motor would lock up in certain parts. We are currently waiting for new gears to be made.

Another problem we've come across is that our project requires the use of two different Surface Pros: one for the gameboard and one for the UI. They communicate with each other using some server software written by the team working on this project last year. The problem is that one of them needs to run Linux instead of Windows. We have tried to install it many times, but to no avail.