Day 7: Does it work?

I think I can take a step forward now! Let me break it down for you guys. So, until now I have been trying to figure out a way to create an arm that will extend/rotate for my robot. For everyone who has read my blog posts, they will know that I have been facing so many problems with it.

I started out by designing everything by vibes, and consequently, it was not going to work. I had created the whole design with GrabCAD components that I was not even sure were available in India. I did not care about the size or the mechanism, just an arm with a shaft hole on one end and a caster wheel on the other.

Then, I realised I needed to think about the mechanism and realised the components I planned on using were not going to work with my arm and chassis. So I thought, Okay, let’s use the same chassis and choose a servo motor (MG90s) and design an arm around it, but this time I found components in robu.in that I can guarantee to buy in India and made CAD drawings of those components on my own.

So yes, now I have a design that I think I will be 3D printing most probably. I will have to buy an MG90S servo motor, power supply, microcontroller, jumper wires, breadboard, screws and nuts as per necessity. I’ll start working on controlling the arm with the servo motor first before working on the whole project. For these components and the arm to arrive, it will take a few days, but I am prepared and have a plan for how I will be using those days.

For my next step, I need to understand control systems. Therefore, I will be learning from Brian Douglas' entire control systems playlist on his YouTube channel. I'll also be developing a 2D simulation of my Parkit robot's intended movement inside a parking lot, a task I first mentioned on day 5. Both of these will be coming up in my blog posts; if you are interested, come back every day and have a look at my progress. That’s a wrap for day 7.