Progress Snapshots
Assemble it Once, then do it Again
Assembly is where you realize that all the parts you thought would fit together try really hard but then decide they don't have it in them. I'm largely referring to the chain joining the two sprockets and leads-crews. I am infinitely grateful to my past self for having the forethought to order 3 feet of chain instead of exactly what I needed. I'm also grateful YouTube has tutorial on how to connect and change the length of chains. I quickly discovered the tower has to be assembled in a very specific order or you have to backtrack a few steps. Faye tried to take an assembly video which ended up riddled with 'And I messed up so we're just gonna pretend that didn't happen and I'll go back a few steps'.
The Dragon Stopper
There may be no better way to make sure that your swivel head knows where to go than to attach a dragon for it to run into.
What's in an Updated Name?
An update on roses and how they smell, as well as a framework for viewing your collection online!
The Things that I'm Willing to do for this FYDP
This week was mostly a machining week. The most exciting things I had to do is use an over foot long drill bit in the mill to make holes from the outside of the part so that they could be located inside the elevator shaft. I also milled the 3D printed Pi Platform. Don't do this! It melts the plastic and comes out really rough but it reduced the width as I wanted. The drilling of the 1.5mm acrylic was even more questionable but I had forgotten holes for the clear door hinges and wanted to hand the assembled part off to the electrical and firmware wizards of the team to tinker with.
Weaving a Neural Net
We now have the card names and the card stats (as outlined in previous blog posts), but how can we match the two together? The challenge is that the card name is not sufficient for identifying a single trading card, as multiple editions of each trading card exist. The colour property of each card is consistent, so when we are sorting by colour it doesn’t matter which edition we are looking at. However, when sorting by value we must differentiate between them.
The Reading Week that I Lived at Watimake
Oof where do I even start. This week was a windmill of CADing, assembling prototypes, and learning that not all filaments are great to 3D print with.
Soldering!
Here are three of five unpopulated boards. We’re only planning to use one, but it’s rather nice to have four spares. It came out pretty well, except that the silkscreen has some overlap on the bottom, the spacing on the motor chips is a tiny bit off, and there’s supposed to be slots on the right for the barrel connectors for the tiny holes. But there’s nothing that will keep it from functioning, so I’m pretty hopeful!
Building a Backend
In order to sort a card, you first need to understand *what* a card is. We have the card’s name, but how do we go from a name to parameters that you can sort? By building a database of cards that we search from, we can store information, such as the card’s colour, value, and set name, which can be used to sort the card. This database can also store users’ collection of cards, sort commands, and other pieces of info.
Got My New Machine Shop Card, Let's Mill Some PVC!
This was the first time I used the E3 machine shop that wasn't the key-chain activity from way back when. The people at the shop, Andrew, Riley, and Tu, were extremely helpful. Normally you would need to sign up for Mill training but I was 'grandfathered in' through their guidance as they put it.
Auto-Routers and Their Auto-Routing
Auto-routers are really awesome tools in my opinion, but sometimes they don’t do what you want, or they can’t solve your board, or you’ve placed some of your own traces and they’re getting in the way and you need to move them before trying again.
The World of Solidworks vs Reality
When I had originally made the CAD drawing I had made the Scan Tower Base structure one solid block with holes made as needed. In reality you have to find a way to machine it and either use glue or screws to keep it together. That means my floating limit switches in Solidworks need actual mounting holes and not just willpower.
Electrical Update!
The good news: after last semester, most of the electrical components were already selected and we had a schematic diagram. The bad news...
What's in a Name?
Unlike in Romeo and Juliet, calling a card by any other name would not smell as sweet (or as accurate).
Some Pizazz for the Wizard
After a meeting to choose a project name for our brochure we ended up with two contenders; Cardobot and CardWizard. We sat on the names for a week, in case we suddenly came up with anything else. No other names came. The compromise was then to use Cardobot as the name but make references to wizards in our slogan.
Starting the Tower!
And so the official construction of the Cardobot scan tower has begun. Here's the 3D printed elevator platform. Took almost 6hrs!
Assessing the Situation
Before we started getting into the nitty gritty details of this project, we took a survey of the local Waterloo Magic:The Gathering community to figure out our objectives, constraints, and criteria. More than 30 people responded, and the data that we collected was useful in guiding the direction of the project.