Work I completed
This week in class, I have continued work on Winston, establishing a power consumption requirement, and learning more about the parts that will go into making it all work. To begin looking at the requirements for the battery, we needed a list of all the parts that were going to be attached, as was made in my previous post. The important parts to note are the 12 servo motors, 9 gyroscopes/accelerometers, and the Wi-Fi chip. These are the components that are believed to require the most power to run. These pieces require currents of 6.6 Ah, 0.315 Ah, and 0.135 Ah respectively. These can be added together to find that there will roughly be a 7 Ah requirement for the circuit. However, for everything to be run on a single battery, the components for the raspberry pi must be taken into account. These components, which currently seem to just be the pi itself and a camera, will have roughly a 3 Ah requirement, bring the total to 10. This means that the battery requirements are 12 V and 10 Ah. This shouldn’t be too hard to find one that can reliable produce this with low costs. Another issue that needs to be considered is the weight of the battery. Current possible batteries weigh about 1 kg, which may be manageable. The issue that arises with high weights is that the servo motors are very small and have lower torque capabilities than ideal. As of now, the cumulative weight of all the pieces should be a low enough load for the servo motors to handle, however, testing will need to be completed to decide later. Overall, the battery requirements can be easily met with low cost and shouldn’t cause too much issue for the robot.
Results
A few weeks ago, there was an in-class assessment week, where test were held for all classes. One of these classes was robotics and mechatronics, and in that task, I was to write about the implications of advancing robots with respect to impact on people. I felt that I wrote a reasonably strong essay, however, I also felt like I’ve written better ones. Earlier this week, I received the results with feedback for this task. I scored an 83%, which seems to be the top of the class, and very close to the top of the faculty. This was exciting to hear, as comparatively I felt worse after this one than I did for a similar task last year but performed better. Overall, the anxiety caused by waiting for results was well worth it, as I got a mark that I am more than happy with and am even more eager to continue to develop my skills and knowledge and do better in the future.
Reflection
In receiving my task, I see that I am consistent with last year in terms of my raw marks, but I can also see that compared to other people I seem to be performing slightly better, predicting my z-score to be just over 1.5. While reading the feedback for this task, I saw that throughout each section of the rubric, I lost most my marks due to lacking depth in my analysis. This lines up with how I felt after completing the task, as I thought I could’ve gone into more detail but ran out of time. Although that is where most my marks were lost, I also read that I had a strong analysis in all other senses, which is good as I believe this type of analysis is something I need to be good at.
In terms of Winston, more progress has been made and more discussions have been had with the other members of the group, and I feel that we are moving forward at a steady pace, and a well on track to completing Winston by the time of PyCon. I look forward both to completing this project, and the process of completing it as an individual and as part of a larger group.