Bench Inspection - Week 6

Keith Marange
Mar 11, 2019
2 min read

The day of our reckoning came and went, with us passing with flying colours. In this blog I will summarise the past five-ish weeks.

Week by week progress

Week 1

We began by familiarizing ourselves with our own individual roles. By the end of the week we had; written an applied code to have servo move with one key input to a given angle, designed the base opting to 3D print it. In the group meetings, we planned and wrote pseudo code.

Week 2

During the week, pseudo code was written for the servo to be moved clockwise and anticlockwise with two buttons. Then pseudo code was written for the character input and the servo to move by a given angle. We then added the pull up function to circuit. The designs for the arm itself were sketched then drawn on AutoCAD, with the first iteration then laser cut.

Week 3

In this week as a group we learnt about gear’s and their ratios, followed up by a design and 3D print of the claw. We decided the claw will have two cogs driven by a single servo. The control box was designed on AutoCAD 360, including the features that will allow for 10 buttons and for the box to tessellate when assembled.

Week 4

Before the lab, we simulated the robotic arm on Tinkercad with two breadboards then simulated the circuit on PSpice. The friday involved the claw being adjusted and assembled. We designed more brackets to be both 3D printed, and laser cut. The control box was assembled.

Week 5

One major problem we overcame was the 10 buttons requiring more pins than the Arduino even

had, so we implemented an additional circuit board. As this was the crucial last push, we planned a timeline for the entire day comprising of 3 teams. One team was to do with coding and wiring up the entire arm, the 2nd and 3rd team tasks were to try out different solutions to small problems we had faced the week before. Each solution would be given a time limit. The circuit was initially tested on a breadboard, then transferred to a Veroboard and finally soldered.

In this blog, there is also a video of our fully working robotic arm in action.