Matt's Engineering Blog

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.

I started this week off by finally soldering my entire pcb, it took most of class since there are a lot of parts, so I only got to test it at the very end of class on tuesday, but it didnt seem to work, so I needed to test it with a multimeter, I suspected the hall effect sensor was not working, so I decided that I would replace it. The next day, I worked on soldering on a new sensor, and this time I added heatshrinks, since the wires are pretty close together, and since they

This week, I primarily focused on soldering and crimping in preparation for soldering my entire PCB, and I made significant progress....