final-project-jessi_winston

Review Assignment Due Date

RoboWave Project

* Team Name: RoboWave
* Team Members: Jessi Jha, Truong (Winston) Nguyen
* Github Repository URL: https://github.com/ese3500/final-project-jessi_winston/tree/main
* Github Pages Website URL: https://ese3500.github.io/final-project-jessi_winston/
* Description of hardware: 2 Atmega328PBs, 2 ESP32 Feathers, Accelerometer, 4 Servo Motors, 1 Flex Sensor

Final Project Report

1. Video

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YAaOwP5Faa_h7_kkFoD2hJd_nlYyPl-F/view?usp=drivesdk

2. Images

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Arm and glove together!

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Just Arm configuration. Included in the are the four servos, an Atmega, and an ESP. The ESP recieves data take from the sensors, sends it to the Atmega, and then the Atmega uses the reading to determine the position of the motors.

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Just glove configuration. The glove consists of a flex sensor, GPU6050 (accelerometer and gyroscope combined), an Atmega, and an ESP. The sensor readings are sent to the Atmega which are sent to the ESP, which is then transmitted via Wifi communication to the robotic arm.

3. Results

Results for the Demo: On demo day, we presented a robotic arms with 4 degrees of freedom controlled by a wired “glove” connected with an accelerometer and flex sensor.

Results for the Video: In the video, we presented a robotic arms with 4 degrees of freedom controlled by a wireless “glove” connected with an accelerometer and flex sensor.

3.1 Software Requirements Specification (SRS) Results

3.2 Hardware Requirements Specification (HRS) Results

4. Conclusion

This project taught us a lot about communication between deveices - mainly, I2C communication, which we used to send data from the accelerometer to the Atmega, and UART communication, which was used to send data in between the ESP32 and ATmega. These two communication protocols were probably the least utilized in the prior labs, so there was a lot of learning on the fly with respect to these concepts. As can be expected, we encountered challenges with regards to these aspects. Our primary struggles related to utlizing different serial ports to print and send data; it was nessecary to configure two different ports to have include these functionalities, and this required editing the UART library code. Additionally, we had to learn the structure of I2C protocals, which requires an IMU driver to communicate with I2C Driver (we used a I2C library and an IMU Driver found on git, more on this later). The I2C driver is hardware specific, and was implemented to read and write data between the accelerometer and the Atmega.

We also ran into some challenges regarding the servo motors. Initially, we anticipated using a servo motor driver, however, because we recieved the driver later than expected, we decided to use seperate power supplies for the motors. Additionally, since we were driving four motors, we needed to the utilize two timers, since each timer has two output compare registers - OCRnA and OCRnB. Taken together, these solutions allowed us to drive 4 motors to control the arm.

By Demo day, the communication between the sensors and the Atmega was relatively smooth. And we were proud that we were able to ensure solid functionality of these protocols, since these are vital processes to the control of the arm. The PWM of the motors are controlled by the sensor readings, so ensuring realible connection from sensor to servo was critical. That being said, by demo day, there were ways in which we fell short. Mainly, we did not include wifi communication in the final demo. While we did have wifi communcation between the glove and arm before our demo, there were sychronization issues, so we decided to temporarily omit wireless communication. We brought Wifi communication back for the final video, which can be seen at the link above.

In terms of project next steps, it would be useful to add remote control communication, perhaps through Blynk IOT. Additionally, making the arm more strucurally sound would also add to the longevity of the project.

References

Fill in your references here as you work on your proposal and final submission. Describe any libraries used here.

3D Printed Arm: https://www.instructables.com/EEZYbotARM/

IMU Driver:

The IMU driver we used was designed to interface with our accelerometer (the MPU6050). There are 7 methods in this library, with each method functionality listed below:

I2C Library:

The I2C library we used provided 7 functions which initalized I2C on the Atmega, allowing the microcontoller to interact with our sensor. Each method is listed below.