2. Project management¶
Assignment
- Sketch Your Final Project Idea
Sketches
This week I worked on sketching my final project and planning how to utilize various technologies within the suitcase that I will be designing and fabricating over the course of the next six months. As stated in the previous page, for my final project I decided to create a suitcase that will follow its owner by employing a variety of tracking and obstacle avoidance technologies. Thus far, I have decided to implement three major technologies that I feel will allow the robot to follow accurately and evade other pedestrians with an infinitessimally low probability of failure. These technologies include Bluetooth tracking via Arduino, object tracking with rPi/TensorFlow, and Arduino obstacle avoidance.
The first sketch is relatively straightfoward as it details the basic goal of my project and how I am going to accomplish said goal. The algorithm that I wrote is incredibly confusing, but I hope to add some clarity once I actually begin to write it in the very near future
Extra Work - Constructing a 3D Printer and CNC Router
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to run its course throughout the United States, students participating in Fab Academy at Charlotte Latin will not be able to meet as frequently as during previous years. Therefore, as students will not have as much access to the various equipment and machinery in the Latin Fab Lab, our instructors decided to purchase a CNC Router and 3D Printer for each student to take home. While the CNC router that we received is a functional generic one that I am certainly not going to modify, the 3D printer that we received is the trusty Creality Ender 3 Pro, which has an incredibly stable modding community in various forums throughout the internet. I have not purchased any modifications to my Ender 3 at the time of this writing, but I will certainly include updates in the “extras” section of any future pages should I decide to upgrade the printer. I have printed several upgrades for the printer directly from it, including an [LCD Screen Cover]() because my printer is currently situated directly beside my bed and the LCD screen grew quite distracting during the night and an [air diffuser]() for the large fan inside of the power supply. Both machines were constructed within a span of roughly six hours, but the CNC machine took significantly longer due to the many small components that were included in the package compared to the largely pre-assembled shipped form of the Ender 3.
Building My CNC Router - Images
Everybody in our group decided to begin by constructing the CNC router, which we were informed by a fellow student, Teddy Warner, who had previously constructed an Ender 3, would likely be more difficult than the printer. I've included various images from the process below which include brief descriptions below them.
CNC Machine Video
Following the completion of my CNC build, I recorded a short video of me using the onboard controller to prove that the device does function properly. While I have not used the machine for any actually CNC'ing as of the time of writing this paragraph, I know that in the following weeks this small device will prove massively useful in optimizing my labor efforts.
Building my Ender 3 Pro 3D Printer
While the CNC machine came in many different pieces that required assembly, the Ender 3 was far more straightforward. As such, I did not take any pictures of the device during the construction phases but have included a timelapse of my first print on the device, which is the Creality dog that comes pre-installed on each Creality 3D printer.
Ender 3 First Print Timelapse
Image & Video Compression
This was the first time throughout Fab that the vast majority of images that I embedded for a given task were captured with a physical camera instead of with screenshots. As I have a relatively new phone that captures photos in great detail,
the files are generally far too large to be embedded in my site. As such, I utilized various compression tools to save over 50 MB of data on this page alone, while altering the images to an infinitessimal extent. Ironically, I did not need to utilize any compression tools on the GIMP logo that is displayed aboove, as it was already perfectly optimized to a degree that I was unable to approve upon by utilizing any software of the preponderance that now occupy a folder on my PC.