Testing the new blimp using manual control. Since the blimp is not fully filled with helium the motors bend when they are activated, making it less maneuverable. Motor placement also inhibits blimp's maneuverability. Testing the capturing mechanism using a controller. Using the controll...
There are two variations to the designs of the motor handles, one for the vertical motor and the other for horizontal motors. They are designed with the intention of keeping the weight low and sturdy as this is used with a brushless motor. Horizontal Motors: The design has a hole going strai...
This was the first attempt at making an active capturing mechanism for the autonomous blimp. We tried using a claw design where the carbon fiber rods acted as claws while a servo motor along with gears assisted in rotary motion of the claw.
The past couple of the weeks were removing the hacks that were put together for the presentation last month. Some things I have added and plan to add to RoCo, particularly in context of integration with scenic. This includes exporting the RoCo output to a format compatible with webots, in a general...
The blimp can hover when it's close to the goal if we set PID value to be small: The blimp will easily lose track of the goal when it approaches from a further distance because our PID value is small: A screen recording shows how it lost track of the goal: How to improve next: ...
We always like to see when we can remove more lines of code than we add. The refactor mentioned in the blog post two weeks ago is finally done and merged, and in general refactoring is wrapping up. Hopefully new feature development (port arrays, then multipack devices) will start next week. A...
The goal detection vertical flying test: The goal detection horizontal flying test: The goal detection hovering flying test: Next step: Need to make a separate PID module for different situations/areas. Function will take in the PID for x,y, and input Improving the horizontal...
The main focus of this week was to familiarize with the use of brushless motors so that we can transition our system to use BLDC instead of regular DC motors. First we had to make sure that we can run it using an ESP32. In order to do that, we utilized Adafruit Servo Shield, which allows us to conne...
Testing the detection of the short range orange circle using Laptop's power: Testing the detection of the short range green square using Laptop's power: Testing the detection of the short range green triangle using Laptop's power: Testing the detection of the long range and big size gree...
Since most of this week has been a refactoring slog on the HDL compiler, I'll instead talk about the engineering for the source-measure unit (SMU, HDL here) and multimeter (HDL here) example design boards that were built last year, but only started to get brought up. As a recap, a SMU is a combi...