Matt's Engineering Blog

A lot of this week was mainly me working on my code to get my leg working. This took me Monday through Wednesday, so that's primarily what I was focusing on, but I got a lot of work done those days. I wanted to make it so that when it moves to a certain position, it would move smoothly rather than just moving the motors once, but rather taking multiple steps in order to do so. And this would also reduce servo overshoot if it goes too far. The way I solved this was by using co

This week, I got a lot done on my leg design, as well as assembling and testing my leg. Firstly, I wanted to redesign a couple of parts since I didn't really like how I made them before. So I spent some time redesigning my foot part of the leg so that the holes were more evenly spaced and there wasn't any weird geometry going on. I also had to change a couple of sizes to make the motor fit better, and I removed one part that made it so the wire wouldn't fit. When I printed it

This week, I got a ton of work done on my design. Firstly, I worked on the foot design, which is the last part of the leg. I wanted to make it lightweight since it's the longest piece I have, so I made holes along it. I also added in a spot for screws at the bottom, since I am connecting both halves with pins, but they are not foolproof, and the pieces can still fall apart, so I wanted the extra reinforcement. I went through a couple of different designs, but I ended up with

This week, I was primarily focused on designing and making prototypes from the physical aspect of my project. I first wanted to start with the base, since I would need that first anyway, and I wanted to get it done before I started working on the arms. I spent a lot of time designing and redesigning it, but in the end, I think it turned out well. I then cut it out using acrylic, and I want to end up making it out of aluminum for the finished thing. The servo motors I'm using

This week, I was mostly working on figuring out inverse kinematics. The ideas themselves aren't too difficult since it's mainly just trigonometry, but I wanted to put it into Desmos so I could have an actual visual representation. This is important since it will allow me to input any coordinate on an XYZ plane, and the equations will find the angles I need to set the motors to in order to achieve this. I spent a lot of the week looking at ways other people have done it, but I

This week, I finished up making my UFO design, and it looked pretty much how I wanted it to. It looked kind of basic when I first made it, though, so I added in some windows around the top of it. I wanted to add in a little alien, but I realized it would be too small for it to accurately print, and the magnet was also in the way. I then printed it, and at first, when it came out, the magnet was a very tight fit, even though when I measured, I gave it a little bit of extra roo

This week, I finally got everything to work, and I'm happy it's finally complete. At the start of this week, I was mostly focused on the breadboard and trying to get it to work again. Last time, I had made the mistake of not making sure everything lined up perfectly. After I made sure the breadboard worked and aligned the parts on the PCB so that they lined up with what I had on the breadboard, I got to soldering. I had to resolder the sensor wire, but I also soldered the PCB

This week was mostly testing, as well as looking at an auction and touring a college. The first thing I did this week was figure out what was wrong with my breadboard. I was testing, and I figured out that the Hall effect sensor was getting extremely hot very quickly, so I realized the issue was most likely there. Last week, I had replaced the sensor I was using before with a new one, and I thought I was using the same one, but it turns out that they were actually different.