Miscellaneous on Aaron BenDaniel's Blog

Senior Week 33

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is my last blog post of my high school career, potentially ever. I’d like to think that I’ll continue this website in college, but I suppose only time will tell.

I decided to engrave my name and the shop’s logo onto my eccentric staircase. I think it looks good, and now everyone will know that I made it.

Mr. L was talking with Ben and I, and he mentioned that Autodesk will soon(ish) drop Fusion360’s support for Windows 10. Unfortunately, this means that the shop will be forced to upgrade all of our computers from Win10 to Win11.

This means that we’ll need a new shop image. Ben and I decided to make one and attempt to de-bloat Win11 as best we can.

The big thing that happened this week was the Sophomores’ Sumo Bot Contest. I’m a bit disappointed that the robot that ended up winning didn’t even work as intended, but overall there was a good showing for this year.

The end of my time in the Robotics & Engineering shop meant that I needed to clean out my box. One of the more major things I still had in there was my Micromouse. I’m still disappointed that I didn’t really end up finishing it, but at the same time I don’t regret stopping to work on machine shop projects. I left my maze and the robot I built in the shop so that if someone else ever wants to continue it, they’ll have everything I’ve built available to them.

Senior Week 26

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week I started a new project: a Bandsaw Fence. I’ve finished the preliminary CAD design, which is admittedly a bit overcomplicated, but frankly this entire project is just another excuse to manufacture stuff, so I guess that’s all the better.

The idea for this project came from Mr. L, who suggested that I make a Band Saw Fence, as we definitely need one. Up until now, we’ve just been clamping a piece of angle stock to the table, which is not great and is not always parallel to the blade.

After I finished modelling, I decided to 3D print everything first in order to confirm that my design isn’t completely awful. Unfortunately, this postpones my project at least a day while I wait for the parts to finish.

The other main thing I did this week was catalog all the endmills that we got from Venca. Ben Wirz and I had already looked through this drawer, but we weren’t really remembering what we saw, only taking a cursory glance.

This time, I went through every label and added it to the spreadsheet. I didn’t look at every individual endmill, but the drawer was already mostly sorted, so I just took note of what labels were there. There’s quite and array of tooling, and I hope that robotics will be able to take (as opposed to borrowing when needed) some of the tools.

Senior Week 25

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first three days of the week I spent milling the second ATC fork, installing it, and fixing the ATC. I needed to make two new ATC forks, so I got a chance to improve my technique for the second one. There was definitely significant room for improvement, mainly with holding the part.

On my first attempt, holding the part for the second operation deformed one of the screw holes because the wall was so thin. To remedy this, I switched up the order of operations and decided to do the holes before anything else and then bolt the part using the screw holes onto a sacrificial piece of holding stock. This new method worked much better and I successfully milled the second fork without the deformations the first one had.

I installed the new ATC forks and they worked great! However, while testing them I noticed a highly concerning issue. The ATC loaded tools from some of the pockets slightly lower than a manually loaded tool. This discrepancy in height might have been the cause of some previous milling mishaps. In order to fix this, I needed to change the height that the spindle moves down to in order to load a tool. Right now, the spindle pushes the ATC wheel down a little when grabbing a tool, but I don’t think it will be an issue. I hope.

The shop had been conversing with local company Vecna Robotics to receive various items that they no longer had a use for. Included in the whole laundry-list of items were various commercial LiDAR senors totalling ~$120,000 USD. These are extremely high-quality sensors that we have absolutely no idea how to use, so we’ll need to learn all about them in order to actually make use of them.

In addition to the LiDAR sensors, Vecna also gave us a bunch of machine tooling. There was a massive drawer array full of stuff, although we’ll have to share it with Metal Fab. There was quite the interesting assortment of items, some of which we had wanted but didn’t have. I personally was quite interested in the ball-end mills.

Senior Week 24

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first three days of this week were spent finishing up the Bike Holder for Metal Fab. I think it turned out pretty good.

It fits the pipe perfectly and the Metal Fab teachers were quite impressed with it. We didn’t have bolts long enough for it, but Metal Fab should be able to buy some easily enough.

With the Bike Holder done, I had nothing to do. However, Ben Wirz was using the Tormach and noted how the ATC is missing a couple parts. Right now, our “12-pocket” ATC only holds 10 tools because we’re missing some parts for it. We could buy them, and while price isn’t really a concern, I looked and they were $47 each!

These parts are required to hold the tools in each ATC pocket, and while we probably could have 3D printed them, they’d most likely break and drop a tool eventually. We could easily enough mill them ourselves so that’s what I set out to do.

I did most of the CAM for it on Wednesday, and started milling the first one on Thursday. It so far looks good, but I still need to do the second setup to see if the part will actually work.

Senior Week 22

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Two or three weeks ago, the main high-pressure water line for the water jet that connected the pump to the nozzle ruptured, with a jet of water shooting out of it when in use. This was, obviously, bad, and needed to be fixed as soon as possible. Mr. Christy ordered the replacement part soon after, but it only arrived just this week.

As the person most experienced with the waterjet, and with my general interest in the maintenance procedures of our machines, I offered to help fix the waterjet.

Mr. Christy and I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday attempting to install the replacement part. We only half succeeded. The ultra-high-pressure water requires extremely delicate seals in order to remain leak-free, and we were unable to stop one end of the line from leaking. Our repair technician for the waterjet recommended replacing the block that it connects to, as all ultra-high-pressure parts are subject to high wear and are considered consumable. We will have to wait some additional time for the extra replacement part to arrive.

The other main thing I did this week was getting to work on redoing Sunk Robotics’ website. I had originally planned to selfhost a Wordpress instance using a server in the Shop, but gave up after failing to find a way to tunnel out of the school’s locked-down network (for free) without port forwarding and decided to use Hugo.

However, after speaking with Mrs. Miller, the Programming & Web Development teacher at MVTHS, I learned that the Programming shop already pays for a service called Bluehost, which supports Wordpress hosting. Mrs. Miller offered to host Sunk Robotics’ website, so I set that up this week. Unfortunately, my work is not done, as connecting the domain sunkrobotics.com to the wordpress instance hosted by bluehost requires some additional setup that I was not able to do this week.

I also started (yet another) machine shop project. Metal Fab needs a clamp to hold some metal tubing, but the one they currently have (and gave to me for reference) does not hold the tube square in the clamp, which is needed for the project they’re working on. They asked the Robotics shop to make a second clamp that would hold the tubing centered relative to the sides of the part. I took on the job of making it. I only started it on Wednesday, so I didn’t get much work done, but it looks like I’ll get to use a new type of milling tool, known as a Shearhog, so that will be interesting.

I’m going on a trip to Rutgers University, so I will not be in school on Thursday or Friday, which is why this blog post is early.

Senior Week 21

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I finally finished the Sound Bend Lathe ways cover! I’m still missing some M10 nuts, but the thing stays in (mostly) without them for now. This should hopefully keeps stuff from dirtying up the ways of the lathe, and I it looks pretty great.

I had already done the carriage end last week, but this week I made another bracket and designed and made a mounting part to attach the bracket to. Manufacturing the parts took two whole days, as our waterjet is currently broken so I had to get Metal Fab to cut the basic shapes and then I needed to manually drill all the holes. The waterjet could have cut the outline and holes in one go and done it far far faster.

I also got to test out the bearing I finished on Friday last week. I ended up finishing the bearing right at the end of the day on Friday, and had to wait until Monday to actually test it. It works fantastic and should hopefully make aligning the tool post much less annoying. I still have a second backup bearing, so I might end up making another one for the Trak Lathe, although it uses some different hardware, so I’d need to change my design a bit.

Here’s a video of it working, narrated by your’s truly.

I also spent a bit of time on Monday and Tuesday helping Mr. L with git and hugo. He didn’t have much experience with either and asked for some help while making his own blog using Hugo. He has chosen to use PaperMod, which is the same Hugo theme I use.

I also started setting up a selfhosted Wordpress instance for the Robotics Team’s website.

Senior Week 20

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing my break from working on the Micromouse, I’ve decided to take up yet another lathe project.

I’ve decided to make a bearing to go inbetween the nut and tool post for our South Bend lathe (I might make another for the Trak, maybe). When aligning the tool post on the lathe, it is quite frustrating when my attempts to tighten the nut also rotate the tool post, forcing me to restart the alignment process. This bearing should hopefully allow the nut to rotate without also rotating the tool post, and should make the process of aligning the tool post much easier.

The first part of this project is a simple spacer, which was rather quick to turn. The important part is the tolerances, which I hit using a boring bar.

Because of how narrow the spacer is, I wasn’t able to securely remount it in a chuck. Fortunately, the finish from the parting blade isn’t too bad, and will work fine when facing down.

The second part of this small project is the holder for the bearing, which I will order from McMasterCarr. The notable thing about this part is that it has an interior pocket, as seen from the scribe lines on the part. What’s called a trepanning tool is needed in order to make cuts like this, but we didn’t have one.

While we probably could have bought a trepanning tool, it would have been a bit expensive, especially for a single project. However, one of the great things about lathes is that it is relatively easy to grind custom tools. As such, we instead bought some tool-blanks and I got try to grinding my own trepanning tool. I haven’t tested it yet, but it look right and I’m hopefully it will work.

Senior Week 19

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week I spent turning the parts of my Tap Follower.

On Monday I finished up threading the holder, which ironically, was the perfect situation for a tap follower.

Once the holder was done, I turned the head, which was interesting because it features a taper that I had to cut with the lathe’s compound.

The head was a pretty simply part and I finished it quite quickly. With the head done, all the main parts of the Tap Follower were complete and I could assemble it.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Along the way, I discovered the most delightful behavior, when pulling a 0.413 inch gauge pin out from the body, it creates a good-enough seal to pull a vacuum and go *pop* when it’s released.

The final part for the Tap Follower is the spring. I had originally intended to wind my own spring, as I had been told that it wasn’t too hard. However, after a couple attempts, I didn’t really get anywhere and gave up. I will be buying a professionally made spring instead.

Despite my failures with winding my own springs, the second one I made worked… sort of. Ben got to try the tap follower out for a single thread before the spring was deformed too much and was rendered unusable. I think the springs I’m making are plastically deforming far too easily, and with springs I buy, I will be able to actually shop around for springs with suitable minimum lengths.

On Thursday, I didn’t have much to do because I needed to wait for my springs to be ordered, so I reorganized all of our resin printing stuff (while storing all the new stuff that arrived). The area underneath the resin printers is much cleaner now. I also spent quite a bit of time helping Tim thread some steel rods, and curiously, we were unable to. The die simply wouldn’t catch and I nor Mr. L could figure out why. I will probably assist Tim with cutting the threads on the lathe.

I also decided to start work on a hopefully short project from Mr. L to make some covers for the South Bend lathe’s ways. We’re going to buy some fabric bellows covers and I need to design a way to mount them on the lathe.

Senior Week 16

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Technically last week was the first week back from winter break, but it was only two days. This is the first full week back from winter break. I did three main things this week.

The first was that I finished the project Mr. L gave to me a while ago, that was stuck waiting for approval from the people who requested it from Mr. L. It’s a plaque that’ll go… somewhere… at the McGlynn Middle School. I water-jet cut the piece and then laser-engraved the text.

Ben Wirz is working on a project that involves a lot of milling, and he asked for my help with using our Tormach PCNC1100 CNC Mill. We wanted to try machining the part using the 4th axis, as it would reduce the number of setups and hopefully increase dimensional accuracy. Suffice it to say, it did not. Unfortunately it appears that our 4th axis has some weird issues (or we’re just using it wrong) and rotating the part throws the Z axis all off. The part we took a video of has a skirt of metal around it that isn’t supposed to be there. We ended up just doing it without the 4th axis and it finally came out correct.

Finally, I continued the frustrating task of attempting to make my Micromouse not drive into walls. My idea of the week is active angle correction based on the Time of Flight sensors. This is what a lot of other Micromice do, but it’s so far been a challenge implementing it. In addition to actually implementing the adaptive movement, I needed to rewrite my motor driving code to be non-blocking. Before, I was creating a PWM signal using delays, but I’ve rewritten everything to use the ESP32 LEDC API, which uses hardware timers and interrupts to allow PWM signals to be generated in a non-blocking manner. Unfortunately, the different motor control method means I need to re-tune most of the movement stuff, which is a real pain.

Senior Week 15

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I honestly didn’t get much done this week. I’ve spent pretty much the entire week trying (and failing) a bunch of different methods to get my Micromouse to drive straight. Everything about the robot works, except for the fact that drives just the tiniest bit off-axis, which causes it to crash into the walls of the maze. I’ve tried almost everything I can think of to get it to stay parallel to the walls, and had some moderate success. Unfortunately, my efforts were insufficient and it still is not good enough.

However, I have one last trick up my sleeve, which is active wall-sensing angle adjustment. This is a pretty common feature in Micromice and I am taking some inspiration from a Micromouse guide I found online. Active wall-sensing was one of the first things I tried this week, but it didn’t end up working out because the Time of Flight sensors I’m using take 40 milliseconds each to send back a reading, and in that time all other code execution is blocked, including my PWM motor control. Even if the adaptive driving code worked, code execution is blocked for too long and it spins wildly out of control.

However, after digging through the library I’m using to interface with the sensors and despite the utter lack of documentation, I found out that it has an asynchronous mode that will allow me to continuously read from the sensors in a non-blocking manor.

class ToF_t {
   public:
    ToF_t(uint8_t initId, uint8_t initOffset) {
        id = initId;
        offset = initOffset;
    }

    void init() {
        tcaselect(id);
        if (!sensor.begin()) {
            Serial.print("Failed to find ToF sensor ");
            Serial.println(id);
            failure(2);
        }
        sensor.startRangeContinuous();
    }

    uint16_t getDistance() {
        tcaselect(id);
        if (sensor.isRangeComplete()) distance = sensor.readRange();
        return (distance);
    }

    bool detectWall() { return (getDistance() < MAZE_CELL_SIZE); }

   private:
    uint8_t id;
    Adafruit_VL53L0X sensor;
    uint8_t offset;
    uint16_t distance;

    void tcaselect(uint8_t i) {
        if (i > 7) return;

        Wire.beginTransmission(TCAADDR);
        Wire.write(1 << i);
        Wire.endTransmission();
    }
};

This is my new and improved ToF_t class that should hopefully allow for continuous senor polling that does not block the execution of other code.

I haven’t finished writing the adaptive driving code, as I just finished implementing asynchronous sensor polling today (2024-12-19), but I’m hopeful that it will work how I imagine it will. Maybe my Micromouse will finally work.

Senior Week 13

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The first two days of my week I spent setting up a Debian server and filesharing container for the Shop. I wanted to take a quick break from working on my Micromouse and was reminded of my repeated frustrations with Google Drive. The shop uses Google Drive to transfer files between computers, such as from my own to the Laser Cutter computer, but it’s always slow and after editing a file, it takes a long time for the changes to sync.

I ended up building a server out of a Thinkpad running an instance of the adevur/easy-samba Docker container. It allows for instantaneous file transfers and can be used for other services as well, should the Shop require them.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

My big accomplishment for this week was finally getting my Micromouse running! It’s still a long way from being done, but all the parts are together and now the main thing it needs is some tuning. At the moment, it’s capable of navigating a maze, but it’s very inconsistent and it’s movements are quite imprecise. It needs to be baby-sat to keep from crashing into a wall. Some of the problems are due to the bumpy cardboard maze, and I do intend to build a nice wooden one. The maze I’ve been using so far is actually Gabe Araujo’s maze, who is building a normal size Micromouse.

The only information the robot is given in order to traverse a maze is:

Starting coordinates
Starting orientation
Goal coordinates
Cell size
Maze dimensions

Everything else is learned during runtime using the onboard sensors.

Yes I know that it keeps turning in the wrong direction, I intend to fix that.

Senior Week 12

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Now that the hardware for my Micromouse is done, I’ve started writing the hardware interface code that will allow my pathfinding algorithm to move the robot to actually solve a physical maze. In the past, I had been using the Arduino IDE 2.0 to develop code for Arduino boards, but I’ve always had some gripes with it. It doesn’t have very good type-checking and it takes forever to compile ESP32 code. The main reason for why it takes so long is that it always recompiles everything even if, for example, the libraries haven’t changed. I have switched to using VSCode with the PlatformIO extension. Not only does this new IDE offer good type checking, but it also caches object files and can reuse them. Because of this, compilations that sometimes took up to two minutes now take around 17 seconds (including upload time).

Your browser does not support the video tag.

I wrote a basic PID algorithm to control the turning of the robot that did work, but after wrangling with it a bunch I eventually gave up and used a PID control library. The library is a little better, but my algorithm was surprisingly good. Unfortunately, even the library, so far, isn’t good enough. Maybe with additional tuning I could get the control precise enough, but as it is now, I can rotate the Mouse a few degrees before it reacts. This is unacceptable and I will need to, somehow, make it even more precise.

Senior Week 01

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The big thing I did this week was starting work on my Micromouse project. I started with modeling the maze the robot will traverse. I want to build a Micromouse to the half-size spec, so each cell is 9cm. I’m only making a 12x12 maze, though. The maze is easily reconfigurable, so I should only need to cut/print one set of parts and they can then be used for infinite different mazes.

I also began figuring out what hardware I want in my Micromouse. I originally wanted to use a Raspberry Pi Pico, but I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve been having trouble getting the BNO055 9-axis accelerometer to work with it. I could use a different IMU, but I have the feeling that I’ll have similar problems with all the other hardware I’ll end up using. The Pi Pico is a really great microcontroller, except for the fact that nothing supports it properly. I’ll probably just find a different microcontroller to use.

In the beginning part of the week, I helped William Tseng clean the water jet cutter. It hadn’t been cleaned in… longer than it’s been at the shop, and together we managed to shovel out quite a few 5-gallon buckets worth of abrasive. We were shoveling out far more than just the garnet we use at the shop, there were lots of other materials in there, most likely from previous owners.

Senior Week 00

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This was my first week back at MHS after summer vacation! Over the summer I did two notable things related to robotics. The first was that Sunk Robotics went to the MATE ROV International Champtionship in Kingsport Tennessee. We had a great time and although we only came in 9th place overall, we came in 3rd place for the proudct demonstration, which in my opinion in the most important.

A month and a half or so after the MATE ROV International Championship, Sunk Robotics was invited to give a demonstration on underwater ROVs for ASLP, a summer camp at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. I and a few other members went and gave a talk and a live demonstration about underwater robotics and our ROV, JONA.

Now, on to things I actually did just this past week! It’s been mostly setting and up and settling in. I set up/fixed the FDM 3D printers. One of the Fusion 3s had a broken extruder that I managed to fix. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to do any test prints on them as we forgot to order more glue sticks. However, I also set up the Lulzbot printer and that one doesn’t need glue. I printed a test print and it worked great!

I also set up the big Tormach CNC Mill. That involved putting in and tramming the vice as well as installing and setting up the automatic tool measurer.

One other thing is that because Scott Campbell is going on co-op this year, his computer station was available, so I moved there and I’ve got a new station to work at now.

Junior Week 38

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I honestly did do much this week. I spent two days helping to clean up the shop and sort miscellaneous items. However, Sunk Robotics has been doing a lot of testing in this final week before the international competition. Matty’s autonomous coral transplant program looks promising. It’s still very unclear whether it’ll be readt in time for our product demonstrations, but it can successfully navigate to the coral transplant site while carrying the coral head without any human input.

I switched around our bottom and back cameras, as the bottom camera is more important and the module that used to occupy that position was rather unreliable. We’ve been having issues with that camera module for a long time and I do not know what the problem is. I’ve tried so many different things to test and/or fix it, but none have succeeded. It doesn’t really matter now, though. The back camera is by far the least important, and we’ll be able to compete just fine without it.

Jonas had been saying that it was hard to attach the carabiner to the U-Bolt, so I reinforced that so now it doesn’t wobble.

I did honestly not that much packing… We never really unpacked most of the stuff we brought to the regional, so all I had to do was verify what we were bringing and add a few items. We’re ready to travel to Tennessee.

Junior Week 37

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I spent this week building the 50ft tether. Last week I had done the soldering and epoxying, but this week I tied the three cables together, put on the cable sleeve, and attached floatation. The new tether is half as long and will hopefully have significantly less voltage drop. It is also quite a bit more flexible, which might help with it getting tangled and bent. In additition to installing the new tether, I cleaned the cart and reorganized everything. It is now in tip-top shape. It was rather impressive how much gunk had accumulated on it, especially the top part that gets more wet.

The new tether has three of my epoxy jobs on it, unlike our old tether which had one of mine and two of the huge and ~~horrible~~ bulky blocks of epoxy. It honestly didn’t matter much, but in my heart I care.

I believe that Sunk Robotics is ready for the International Competition in Kingsport Tennessee.

Junior Week 36

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week has been mainly taken up with my assembling of our 50ft tether. We originally built a 100ft tether because we didn’t want to ever run into a scenario where we didn’t have a long enough tether, but it turns out that the tether can be too long. JONA ROV works as is, but there is a significant voltage drop on the ROV side while drawing a large amount of current. The shorter tether should significantly reduce voltage drop, while still being more than long enough for the MATE ROV Competition.

We’re building a whole new tether, so we’ll still have our 100ft tether if we ever need the extra range.

Midway through the week, it looked like we’d need to put a hold on the 50ft tether for a few days as we did not end up having enough epoxy to seal the splices in the tether for the Blue Trail Engineering connectors. Luckily, Mr. Christy was able to pick up some epoxy on his way home and we were only set back one day instead of the rest of the week.

We’ve been having a very annoying and potentially competition-costing problem where the bottom camera is very inconsistent to turn on. Once it’s on, it’s stable, but getting it to turn on is a big pain and can take quite a few power cycles. I never really figured out the problem, as (in theory) the hardware in the bottom camera is identical to the back camera, which has had no issues whatsoever.

I had a hunch that maybe the RPi in the bottom camera was somehow broken or otherwise just less resilient to wonky power-ons, like what the ROV does on startup. I switched the hardware out for another camera module I had and, while I haven’t done extensive testing yet, it appears to have solved the problem. Hopefully this will significantly improve the reliability of JONA ROV.

Junior Week 35

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On Sunday we got our technical documentation scoresheets back so we were able to review them and edit our Tec Doc for the international competiton. I made quite a few changes and went over them with Zack before integrating them into our doc. I also helped Zack with our budgeting for our trip. It’s a very rough estimate, but it looks like this trip will be cheaper than last year, mainly thanks to Tennessee being close enough for us to drive to. Not having to buy flights, train tickets, or bus tickets will significantly reduce travel expenses. It also means we won’t need to pack JONA into a box.

I also helped to reimage some of our machines in the shop and set up a new laptop for the shop. These items were generously donated by the Toyota Research Institute.

I hope that the Robotics Team will be able to requisition the Thinkpad for next year, as our current club laptop is not great and we’ve mainly been using Matty’s personal laptop for piloting JONA. Matty’s laptop works great, but he and his laptop will be gone next year so we need to find a replacement. I’m not too sure if the Thinkpad will actually be better than our current laptop. The new one has a 7th gen i7, and our current one has a 10th gen intel whose category I don’t know.

Junior Week 31

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

April break was last week, the robotics team did a lot of practice over the week and Jonas is hopefully well experienced in piloting JONA now.

Of course, we will continue to practice, but hopefully we should be pretty good for the competition now.

All of our documentation is due on April 26, so this week we’ve been extremely busy writing it. I wrote a bunch of stuff a while ago, so we haven’t actually needed to write everything this week. But still, we did end up writing quite a bit.

I also made an SID for JONA, which introduced me to the webapp LucidChart. It’s…. fine, but there are a few things that I find annoying about it.

Junior Week 30

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Thursday last week I had started a project to build a shelf for the cart, but that got postponed when on Friday, the day of our Andrews presentation, JONA ROV mysteriously stopped working. Before we left for the Andrews, I determined that one of the ESC Board was the cause of the problem. For the live demos for the middle schoolers. I rewired the motors so that only four of them worked, but four motors gave JONA enough freedom of movement for the demo. It was quite disappointing that it broke just in time for a live demonstration.

It took me three days to fix JONA, and I am left none the wiser as to the cause of the problem than before.

Not one but two ESCs had mysteriously broken and were drawing massive amounts of current whenever they were connected. I ended up replacing them and the ESC Board worked again. However, before I determined they were the issue, I ended up desoldering a functional ESC in the process. Sometime between me testing the first ESC I desoldered and after I tested it again once it was back on the ESC Board, it was no longer functional.

I have to assume the repeatedly soldering and desoldering the ESCs damages them over time, or at least has a high chance to damage them each time I do it. This ESC worked fine before I began investigating, but now it is dead. (For an unknown reason).

The whole ordeal finished with me replacing a total of three ESCs, all of which broke for unknown reasons. Definitely not for the regional, but assuming we win, I plan to design an ESC Board V3 that we not require the ESCs to be directly soldered to the PCBs. It was a good idea, but ultimately it appears it has too high a chance to damage the ESCs.

After I had JONA fixed, I began cleaning the cart. It desperately needed a wipe-down and the cables were a mess. I reorganized the cart and hopefully it should remain so for a slightly longer amount of time than it lasted before. I am aware that it will be impossible to keep the cart clean and organized, so I guess we’ll just have to give it semi-monthly cleanings. Or something.

Junior Week 29

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

At the start of the week I finished soldering the Ethernet Switch Board V2, which features a Gigablox Gigabit Ethernet Switch.

The new switch works great, and not only does the RPi have a gigabit connection to the surface computer, all the camera feeds don’t share a single 100MBps connection now.

The third version of the Power Distribution Board is done, but I’m waiting or order it until Scott has finished a PCB of his own. The shipping cost from JLCPCB is about the same as the PCBs themselves, so we are trying to consolidate orders to save on shipping. The new board features a fully isolated 5V power system, with a new regulator and opto-isolators. The board also continues the migration effort towards XT30 connectors and has some holes to accommodate a servo for our prospective gripper.

I think other than the PDBoard V3, my current projects for the robotics team are mostly done, which means I’ll be open to start another personal project. ~~I’ll need to think of something to do.~~ UPDATE BELOW

UPDATE:

Thursday after school Matty wanted to make some backups of the Tube Cameras’ SD cards. While he was doing that, I decided to begin designing a shelf to add to our cart. We’re having serious organizational problems with the cart, and while I intend to fix them, they will just reappear without a better solution. My solution is to create an additional level for storage that will be organized to hold miscellaneous parts, while the bottom level is for more staple things.

Junior Week 28

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The PCBs arrived this week so I’ve begun assembling them! I began with the Logic Board, which is the most important to get working. The capacitor control circuitry is very important to get running because bottom camera mysteriously won’t turn on when the capacitor is plugged in. This actually makes quite a bit of sense, but it’s mysterious because the rear camera (which has identical hardware) has no issues at all.

I tested the circuitry before putting it into JONA and it appeared to work, but it causes strange issues when the RPi5 tries to control it. I need to look into this more in the coming week.

I also began assembling the new Gigabit Ethernet Switch Board. This new board accommodates a Gigabit ethernet switch and an RPi Zero to act as a router. The RPi5 should be able to act as the router without issue, but it is causing issues with the front camera when it is.

Scott, Ben, William, Tanzy, and I all contributed to buying 108 cans from Wegmans for the NTHS Food Drive. Wegmans double-delivered so we got a total of 217 cans. If Robotics doesn’t win… I don’t know.

Junior Week 27

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week I verified that the PCBs I designed last week were good. I didn’t find any issues, so they got ordered.

I’ve also been redesigning the Power Distribution Board… again. In order to accommodate an isolated voltage regulator and some optoisolators. I’ve needed to make a number of footprints by hand, so it’s been going slow.

On Wednesday, I helped Matty tune the PID systems of JONA. Now that they’re tuned, the ROV will maintain a set depth, roll, and pitch angle. This will significantly improve controllability.

Also on Wednesday, the ROV broke, I think it has to do with some water getting in, evaporating, and then condensing, but I really don’t know. I doubt I’ll ever know the source of the problem.

I did figure out what broke, though. One of the ESCs had a capacitor pop and it sprayed it’s capacitor gunk on the ESC. I will need to replace that unit.

Junior Week 26

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I spent this week continuing to increase reliability in JONA ROV’s 5V power system, with more success than last week. JONA ROV can reliably function without random shutdowns, but powering it on is now a bit of an ordeal and the bottom camera no longer works. Fortunately, the cause for both of these problems is known. Both are caused by the 2.5F supercapacitor I added to solve the random shutdowns.

Miles Hilliard came up with the solution I’m going to implement. He suggested that the capacitor be, by default, disconnected from the 5V power system through an NPN or MOSFET, and only be connect to the system by the RPi5 after its finished booting. Miles and Shane designed the circuit to control the capacitor, and I made the necessary modifications to the Logic Board. I hope to order this new Logic Board soon.

Matty had suggested that the latency and frame-rate problems we’ve been having with the cameras are, at least in part, caused by a lack of available bandwidth connecting the surface laptop to the ethernet switch. We always knew about the 100Mbps limit, but didn’t think that it would pose too much of a problem. It appears we have been proven wrong. Luckily, Bot Blox, the manufacturer of the 100Mbps switch we were using also selling a slightly larger Gigabit switch. This new switch should alleviate all of the bandwidth issues, but a new PCB is required in order to accommodate it’s larger footprint and gigabit connection.

The Tube Cameras can’t get gigabit connections, as two of the twisted pairs in the CAT 5E cable are needed for power, but each individual camera shouldn’t need more than 100Mbps. It’s only the tether and the RPi5 that need a gigabit connection, as all the camera feeds need to be transmitted through their connections.

I also added mounting holes for an RPi Zero, should we decide to add one to the Ethernet Switch Board. We’ve been facing issues with the front camera, although I don’t know the details, I know that it has something to do with the RPi5 acting as both a camera and a router. If the increased bandwidth doesn’t fix the issues with the front camera, we’re going to try using a separate Pi Zero as the on-board router.

Junior Week 25

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

JONA ROV has been experiencing major power stability problems with its 5V system. I’ve been attempting to isolate and solve the problem for… a while, and I’m still not really any closer to solving it.

The new Power Distribution Board is done and it has quite the janky capacitor+diode addition to it. I can’t really tell if the capacitor is helping much, though.

I tried adding some capacitors to the 5V system and they do help, but they also make turning the ROV on a bit of a hassle. The RPi5 is fussy with how it receives power and the capacitors interfere with it turning on smoothly. I ended up adding a 2.2mF capacitor and a 2.5F supercapacitor.

Junior Week 24

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On Monday I tested the feasibility of re-programming the ESCs to change the startup melody to “Shipping Up To Boston”. I need to use the website esc-configurator.com because the official BLHeli software doesn’t allow for reprogramming the startup melodies for 8-bit ESCs (which the Blue Robotics ESCs are). I have so far been able to change the startup melody, but the re-programmed ESCs don’t function yet. I only worked on this on Monday, as the new Power Distribution Boards arrived on Tuesday.

I spent Tuesday soldering and debugging the 2.5V voltage reference for the ADC. It is by far the smallest component I’ve ever soldered and I ended up using the hot plate to solder it, as the hot air gun would blow the part away even on its lowest air setting.

On Wednesday I began soldering on the other components, and after school Shane and I discovered that the ADC has its own voltage reference and no VREF pin… So the voltage reference on the PCB is useless.

We also discovered that the ROV is broken. During the process of once more reducing voltage drop, something broke and I2C stopped working. I think that the problem is with the 9-axs IMU, but I am not 100% sure and need to do some additional debugging.

Junior Week 22

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week was rather slow, as I was between projects and was doing a number of quick and small tasks.

The main exciting thing that happened this week was that JONA finally got to take a swim in the pool. Unfortunately, the rear camera didn’t work due to a corrupted SD card (which might be due to a hard power-off or just a bad card) and there were… technical difficulties that led to the IMU not working during our testing. The IMU issue is fixed now, but that meant that we couldn’t test rotational PID this week.

The RPi4 is having power issues. I thought that I had solved this issue by decreasing the resistance in the 5V power systems, but the problem has reappeared. I don’t think that it is begin caused by the same source, though, this time. There is very little voltage drop, not enough to be causing this issue. I believe that out voltage regulator simply cannot supply enough current to power the 5V system. Unfortunately, I can’t accurately measure the current consumption of the ROV, as the Shop doesn’t have any tools to measure quick current spikes, which I believe to be the problem.

I haven’t confirmed the actual cause of the ROV’s problems, and am betting that it’s due to insufficient current supply. If increasing the available current still doesn’t solve the issue… I don’t know what I’ll do.

I also started designing a mechanical gripper for the ROV. I only did the very basic mechanical design before I handed it off to a prospective new member. Alex Pilika is a sophomore in the Robotics & Engineering shop and has expressed interest in joining the team. He has said that he will attempt to design a gripper, but honestly, I’m doubtful that it’ll actually get done in a reasonable amount of time. I guess I’ll see in the next week or so.

Junior Week 20

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I spent most of this week working on my Machinist’s Jack project. I spent the first two days attempting to turn the head of the jack, and I almost completed it. However, the threads I made had too high a diameter because I made the assumption that 1/2-13 screws are actually 1/2in wide. This is not the case. I attempted to save what I had made but ultimately had to scrap it. It did serve as a refresher on how to use a lathe, though, as I had very little previous experience using them before.

Wednesday after school I and a number of other team members wrapped our tether. Although I’m still not sure how we’re going to add flotation to it, at the moment I think the tether is in a very good place right now. I also added strain relief to the tether on the ROV’s side. I intend to use the same system on the surface, but need to find one more part before I can finish that.

Wednesday and Thursday I made the base of my Machinist’s Jack. It’s not quite done, with just a little but of facing left to remove the excess material on one side, but other than that this part is done.

Junior Week 13

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week I had to put PCB design on pause, as I was waiting to be able to speak with Shane about what he believes the problems was with the old ESC PCBs. We did discover the problem, Ben’s and my attempt at attaching the motors to the ESC PCBs without the actual connectors proved to be…. less than ineffectual. Accidental bridging was the cause of us blowing two traces on the PCBs.

I assembled our downwards-facing camera this week, it employs the new 5V PoE “standard” we developed. It requires only a single CAT 5E cable to transmit both 5V power and 100mbps ethernet. I have yet to mount it, though, as I write this, the part is printing.

I also began adding all of the tasks I need to do to Sunk Robotics’ new task management system: Notion. I can certainly see the advantage of this system, but adding all of my tasks will be a pain (I will only have to do this many at a time once, though).

Junior Week 12

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

(Late because at first I didn’t even intend to write this, but I didn’t want to be missing a week so here it is)

The only really notable thing that happened this (very short) week was the robotics trip to MITRE. We missed periods 3-6 and attended the opening ceremony of MITRE’s Blue Tech Lab. There were a bunch of important people there, including Under Secretary Spinrad of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

We were also invited to another event that’s going to be hosted at MITRE. January 27-28, MATE will be hosted an event to educate teachers about the MATE ROV competition, with the intent of starting more teams in the New England area. Sunk Robotics was invited to speak about our experience in the competition, and about how we got started as a MATE ROV team. We have yet to decide who will go, as I doubt they really want us to bring the whole team. Personally, I think we should bring a maximum of four people.

Junior Week 08

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week was quite slow, as I’ve been waiting for parts for both the ROV Frame and Electronics Enclosure. I took this time to begin writing documentation for everything I’ve done so far. MATE requires extensive documentation of the process of building our ROV. I’ve so far written a fair amount about the Frame, Electronics Enclosure, Camera System, and Thrusters. The following is an excerpt from what I wrote about JONA ROV’s thrusters.

“We decided to design our own thrusters guards, although we were heavily influenced by UWROV’s design. Our thrusters guards meet the IP-20 requirements of the MATE ROV competition but cause the minimum impedance of water through our Blue Robotics T200 thrusters. This allows us to make use of as much of the force our thrusters generate as possible while still maintaining the standard of safety required of us.”

On Wednesday the ESC PCBs I ordered arrived! They arrived super quickly, far quicker than we expected, although this turned out to be a bad thing. The reason the PCBs arrived so fast was because they were green. We thought we ordered black PCBs, which take longer to make, but for some reason we got green ones instead. Regardless, the color is aesthetic only, and has no impact on the functionality of the board.

Mr. Christy and I attempted to solder a Blue Robotics ESC to one of the boards, but the solder paste Mr. Christy had did not work. We’re unsure as to why, but the solder paste melted almost instantly (suspiciously quickly) and it was far too runny. It didn’t wick onto the solder pads and we decided not to attempt any further soldering until we had new solder paste. The solder paste we used was 6 years old, but I’m unsure how long it takes the kind we used to expire.

Thursday I soldered all of the connectors onto one of the ESC PCBs. We’re going to need two of them in the end, so we can test soldering ESCs onto another board and we can use the one I soldered today once we have perfected the process.

Our 6 inch tube also came in on Wednesday! I put together the tube flanges we had already received, lubricated them, mounted the electronics frame I had made a few weeks before, and put everything together. It looks pretty good! I can finally begin to see the electronics enclosure I’ve spent so much time designing beginning to come together!

Junior Week 05

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week, the primary thing I’ve been working on has been a prototype PCB frame for the Robotics Team’s new ROV.

I laser-cut a bunch or parts and cut some lengths of threaded metal rod. I then assembled everything, which took a while because I needed to thread 44 M3 nuts onto the long threaded rod. This whole process took two days.

Wednesday after school, I taught Miles Hillard, a prospective new member, how to design PCBs in Fusion 360. He had previous PCB design experience, although not with Fusion. He definitely needs more practice, but I believe he will eventually become an adept PCB designer.

Thursday I tested our 4-wire ethernet plan, and I can confirm that only the green and orange twisted pairs are required to 100mb/s ethernet. I made an image to reference so I won’t forget how our CAT 5E cables need to be crimped.

Friday the Robotics & Engineering shop goes on a field trip to Tulip Interfaces, so I will not be able to complete any work that day.