Work with your lab group to build a "sidewalk plotter"; a 2+ DoF drawing machine. Your team is encouraged to heavily modify the example hardware and software. At a minimum, you should implement a new end-effector.
For this assignment, we broke off into a software and hardware team. I was assigned to the software team, as I was more comfortable with that. Unfortunately, the hardware team took over 2 weeks to produce an MVP without an end effector. It was not until then, on the Saturday night before the assignment was due, that the software team was able to begin coding and testing. Thus, the software team unfortunately was not able to accomplish much, and I cannot say much about what the hardware team did because I was not a member. Noa, David G., and I struggled a lot because of the little time we were given by our teammates, which was extremely frustrating. As a result, we found integration to be a challenge. Still, I will document what little I have from the experience.
The hardware team gave us a design that had us moving left to right on a belt and up and down using wheels. The software team originally planned on using a software, FluidNC, that was made for CNC machines and was meant to convert SVGs, PNGs, etc. into gCode and then control the movement. We spent much of the one night that we could work together attempting to puzzle this out but ultimately did not succeed due to how highly specific and poorly documented the package was. We realized around midnight the night it was due that we would not get far with this. It was around that time that we decided to switch to hard-coding the bare minimum requirements when we realized the hardware was not fuctioning for whatever reason. After fiddling with this for many hours, we were able to get it moving. We found through trial and error that, for whatever reason, the wheels moved in opposite directions, causing a spinning motion of the marker.
Short on time and sleep, we decided to pursue this option. In keeping the pen constant but moving a full rotation, we could draw the circle that the assignment, along with lines and spirals. At this time, the only end effector we had been given was a sharpie glued to a servo motor attached to an entirely new ESP32. We managed to get a circle-ish, but ultimately, the project was not a success. I was very frustrated this week, since it also took time from my final project, but I learned a lesson about teamwork, so that has to be worth something.
For formatting reasons, I cannot include the code in my website. Instead, feel free to download the file HERE.