17. Machine design

Aim

After having mechanically assembled and moved the machine,this week the aim was to automate the machine.

Individual Contribution

1. Electronics and Programming

The electronics and programming part was entrusted to me. It has been a hard job learning translating the inverse kinematics to make machine firmware in a time of 5 days. The reference from this page was used on this. After all the purpose of this week was to make machine automatically perform programmed manoeuvre.

The code used is referred in the main project page

The connections were performed as mentioned in the main project page

The plan was to send the Gcode via a standard G code sender and the machine will read it to move according to the code. A 12v power supply device was connected and it was observed that the machine is not responding . We tried debugging and it was too late to find the error in the already written firmware. However we did decide that we will work on this and make it working. For the time being the machine movement was automated to draw a random closed polygon.
The working video is embedded in the main project page

2. Documenting the Group Machine page

The main machine page was documented with inputs given from my friends. For first time HTML was used to update the page with contents.

Further Development

We do want to improve the functioning of the machine by building the firmware again from scratch.