Work I Completed
This week was spent working on testing more ideas for Winston. I have learnt once again why exactly I should start earlier. I tried a couple more times with the band that broke – during PyCon the pulley belt acting as a tendon snapped (luckily after the showcase). By this point it hasn’t been fixed, but I attempted this last week. I attempted simply to replace that belt, since all the other ones still worked. The new ones, however, have also seemed to break, while the old ones remained strong. To this I blame impatience. Although dried, the glue on the belts may not have been strong enough yet, and I should have waited a bit longer. This is an easy fix though; I just need to leave it to dry either overnight or during school. I will do this tonight so I can work on it more tomorrow. The next issue is keeping the motors from caving in. For this, I have tried using a stronger wood to hold them separated. While this did show some improvement, it was not fully fixed. This was because, although I can measure the correct distances accurately, I cannot completely accurately cut those spaces by hand. This means there is some error margin which does cause error. A solution I could employ here is to instead print the component, so that at least the two beams are similarly inaccurate. This is likely what I will do since printing is still sturdy, but more reliably accurate than handmade. I will be able to test this later in the week which means I will be able to definitively outline what exactly is wrong. Most of the theory should be done, however. So, other than new theory after the current inevitably fails, it is a matter of working out how to implement it. This should not be too hard to complete on time. A concern, however, is how I am going to create and implement am effective inverse kinematics algorithm – the primary purpose of my project. I will find a way to include it somehow so there is a show of understanding, but I don’t know if I will have the complete algorithm and project done in 7 days.
Reflection
I am a little behind where I need to be still (never could have seen this coming…) but I have plenty of time to finish. I am calmed mainly by the fact that I have started working on it as of now. I am not sure if I will be able to achieve a fully walking dog, but I do think I should be able to make one that can reliably stand and crouch up and down. I am unsure about the implementation of inverse kinematics. I should have at least what I did for PyCon which is a very basic implementation of it. I was hoping for more advanced by now but this is what I get for procrastination…
I have a large chunk of work left, including testing and maybe even more research if current ideas fail, but I do not believe it is yet too late to finish this project on a good note.