Week of Thanksgiving

Meetings

Nov 26

Members present: Kendrick, Dat, Usama, Steven

The plastic parts were printed and allowed to sit in the chemical bath overnight in order for the support material to separate from the actual part. There was not much to do, since Parallax servos are still shipping. The assembly of the physical hand will be occuring over the weekend once all the parts and hardware can be cut and drilled.


Nov 25 (during lab session)

By this time, most of the physical and mechanical aspects of the project were completed. The arm was constructed over the weekend by Steven, complete with recessions for the servo motors. Professor Sullivan also allowed us to have the final design of our knuckle printed. We had 30 printed at about 1.5 cubic inches of material, and perhaps about 1 cubic inch of support material. The machine said it would take about 4-5 hours.

A rough version of the glove was also presented. It had one flex sensor attached to one finger on the glove and some hookup wire soldered to the flex sensor leads. Conceptually this should work for the rest of the fingers, so sometime over the weekend, more flex sensors will be attached.

The RF transmitter and receiver arrived in the mail, and progress was made to at least get a successful transmission to happen. During the end of this project, the focus will be shifting to the programming and Arduino aspect.

Weekly Progress

Dat Le
Time spent: 5 hours

Over the weekend, I determined that the best way to have the flex sensors attach to the glove was by inserting into a "slot." I achieved the slot by sewing a stitch into the top portion of the finger of the glove. This keeps the flex sensor aligned with the finger, but allows it to move back and forth along the length of the finger (very slightly) to allow for bending.

I also purchased some hookup wire from Radioshack and was able to solder it to the leads of the flex sensor. I tested it by stripping the wire ends and plugging it into the breadboard and it works fine. With long lengths of hookup wire, we will no longer need to worry about mounting an entire Arduino and breadboard onto the control glove.


Kendrick Lo
Time spent: 1 hour
I looked into getting a nice power source for the arduinos and managed to find a good plug in source that was compatible. It will only be able to power one arduino, which wont be that great since we are using multiple.


Steven Passios
Time spent: 1-1.5 Hrs

Over this week I created the Solid-works representation of our project. It appears to work as intended but the motion study didn't.

If all goes well, according to the 3D model we should be able to place both the arduino and the breadboard onto the back of the base of the assembly. This will save us space as well as helping to balance the assembly which I believe may be front heavy..


Usama Saadat
Time spent: 4 - 5 hrs.

Having ordered the RF transmitter and receiver last week, I began this week by assembling a mock circuit with the parts already included in the sparkfun inventor's kit. I used this system as a first draft to test some of the basic code and to familiarize myself with the basic format of the functions I'd be utilizing.

The circuit that I created consisted of a flex sensor and a servo motor connected to the same Arduino. The flex sensor was connected to an analog input and this data was then mapped and output to the servo motor. While the overall circuit was very simple, the prototype did allow for me to determine a basic format and flow that I will likely transpose to later drafts of the code.

*** [insert code] ***


In addition to this, I spent some time brainstorming the ways in which the RF transmitter / receiver would transmit the data. Having realized that the code would be a bit more involved than I initially imagined, given that the RF transmitter / receiver would only be able to transmit data in terms of character arrays, I would likely need to find a way to convert the integer values into an array and to decompose that array on the receiver end.

Having analyzed the relative complexity of this endeavor, I also decided to abandon the idea of the preset remote controller, given that creating a quality wireless dynamic control would likely be a greater priority than having a redundant remote control.