1. Principles and Practices + Project Management¶
During this week, I worked on starting up my website for documentation by working through git tutorials and started planning and sketching my final project idea.
Final Project Planning¶
The first thing I did before joining the Fab Academy Course was think about what I wanted to make for my final project.
Ever since I learned about it, I was always intruiged by Tesla’s autopilot and autonomous driving. I watched many (probably too many) video on how it works theoretically and in live action. I was especially astonished by the cars’ ability to move away from objects to avoid crashing. This idea inspired me for my final project. I decided I want make a robot with sensors all around it that can move away if it senses an object coming too close to it.
I drew a sketch of what I wanted the base to look like:
Here is a table of what I thought I could do each week to help me in my project creation process
| Weekly Topic | Product towards final assignment |
|---|---|
| Computer Aided Design | Modeling of my robot Chasis |
| Computer Controlled Cutting | Cutting Vinyl Sticker for Design |
| Electronics Production | NA |
| 3d Scanning/Printing | 3d print Omni wheels/Mecanum wheels |
| Electronic Design | Design Board Works Lidar Sensor |
| Computer Controlled Machining | NA |
| Embedded Programming | Program Chip |
| Moulding and Casting | Moulding and Cast Part of a Mecanum Wheel |
| Output Devices | Movement of Robot with two geared DC motors |
| Mechanincal/Machine Design | Robot wheels and movement |
| Input Devices | Lidar/Time of Flight Sensor |
| Networking and Communications | NA |
| Interface and Application Programming | NA |
Github Website Set Up¶
The first thing I did for the course was setting up my website for documentation. I initially had a Macbook, but it was very old and could not run the simplest software, so I decided now would be a greatt time to get a new computer as it could be used for this course as well. I decided I would work on the online IDE untill my new laptop was delivered. I found the online IDE to be very user friendly, but I knew I could only work on it if I had internet connection, and wouldn’t be able to edit my site directly on my computer.
After I got the laptop, I had to learn all the different processes on the new operating system as I had a mac before and this was a windows. On the windows, I decided I would use the Visual Studio IDE with MkDocs in order to work on my website and document locally. My first step in doing this was downloading all the software and applications nescessary, including MkDocs, the newest version of python, pip, and git.
Setting Up SSH Key¶
In order to be able to clone my GitLab repository to my computer’s local drive, I needed to set up my SSH key. To do this, I followed the following steps:
- Download Gitbash
- Copy/paste ths code into Git Bash Terminal (make sure to add your own email and run as an administrator):
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "email@email.com"
This command generates you a new SSH key, and you keep pressing enter untill it prompts you with a password. 3. When asked to enter a key word, make sure to enter a password you wll remember 4. After that, enter the following command to copy your key
Get-Content ~/.ssh/id_filename.pub | Set-Clipboard
This process took me almost 3 hours overall, and I had to refer to many different resources to figure this out, including this slideshow, previous graduate Teddy Warner’s webpage, the FabAcademy GIT SIMPLE CHEAT SHEET, and my fellow student Alaric Pan.
Cloning Repo in VSCode¶
After I copied my SSH key, I went to my repository on Github and went to the clone repo menu on my repo and copied the clone by ssh option, and I used the following command on the command line:
git clone [copied text]
Pushing and Pulling through Visual Studios¶
Since I am editing my site locally, I have to push my edits my site for others to view them. Through FabAcademy’s GIT SIMPLE CHEAT SHEET I found these lines of could that would do that:
- to upload your files
git add .
- to name your update
git commit -m 'name’
- to upload to your repository (will ask for your passphrase)
git push
If you ever find yourself working on the online IDE and see that your visual studo code is not up to date with your public site, you can pull the site onto your local with
git pull
Here is an Example of what the Visual Studios Code IDE looks like
