Sprint Review 2!

It’s time for a recap of Falcon! On Friday, November 6th, we had our second sprint review, but the first major one in front of all of the other teams. Overall, I think it was a successful outing! Here is the summary:

Our Team Learning Goals:

• Design attractive electrical and mechanical components
• Low level microcontroller communication
• Maintain thorough and up-to-date documentation
• Identify and prevent software failure modes
• Design an elegant, integrated mechanical system

Our Sprint 0 Kaizen:

Spend the last 15–20 minutes of meetings documenting the significant work completed during the work session.

Our Sprint 2 Deliverables:

• Blog with ongoing documentation ( hint: you’re reading it)
• Purchase of ClearPath Servo Motors & suspension cables (final hardware)
• Path generation and validation
• Arduino control of servos
• Fully built test platform

ClearPath Servo Motor. We purchased 3 of them as final hardware.

Our Integrated Product Thus Far:

Our Path Generation Validation:

The right shows a generated spline for the camera to move. The right shows the changing cable lengths from each node.

Our Biggests Current Risks:

• Velocity vs position control for servos
• Communication and latency
• Flexible mounting nodes for full-scale model
• Spooling mechanism

Our Biggest Sprint Decisions:

• Communication protocol — Serial Port vs SPI vs I2
• Documentation style
• Hardware final purchases (motors & cables)

ClearPath Servo Motor Torque Curves

Our Sprint 3 Goals:

• Directional control of camera
• Control servos using Arduinos from Raspberry Pi over I2C
• Website complete (and on POE website)
• Finalized mechanical design
• Power supply purchase
• Continue to document

Our Feedback:

We got 26 responses to our presentation. Among a general feedback and suggestions section, we had these two scaled questions, graphed below:

I think we are on track for a great project! And the people seem to agree. Stay tuned!