The last two weeks

[Jim Anastassiou]

Hi everyone,

I should say this update is long overdue, so I will briefly list all recent progress here and In respective the subforums.

• A replacement for the discrete components was discovered by Tibi and Ahmed (actually we had overlooked it previously in Milestone1). It's an open source 2-axis gimbal controller board for 35$ US that features an Atmel 328P, two L6234 3-phase inverters and an FTDI chip on board. For that price its way cheaper than order the discreet components and using a standalone Arduino.
  
• We ordered and received two boards at the lab and Ahmed and I had some fun re-purposing the code.
• A Raspberry pi was set up 
• Work continued on the GUI, but it hasn't been loaded on the pi yet
• Daniel spent a few days re-printing the parts and we assembled and tested the Gimbal last Friday using the GUI that came with it for calibration
• I discovered a hack that allows very little modification of the firmware...which is pretty well written using interrupts and proper task management , it just needs a  clean up to accept the self-calibrating IMU
• Had trouble calibrating the pitch motor, need to tinker some more...or might need to go one step bigger

I believe there is a weakness in the planning for this milestone and we can improve to be more efficient as a network for future contracts. The centralization of the prototyping phase  has created a single point of failure which I disagree with. I suggest for future contracts we allocate a budget for parts earlier into the project and send the to those that are dedicated contributors from remote locations and that have the proper tools. Parallel prototyping would increase our chances to meet deadlines and allow more affiliates to participate in the process. Because we've been extremely occupied at the lab with a bombardment of initiatives from all angles we haven't had time to document any work on PV, which might have led others to think there was no work done :)

Jim