Structure Prototype and Wireless Communication 11/21/2013

This week we split up the team for the structural design and wireless communication. Fredy and Claire were both working on the Mechanical Structure Design. Cutting boards from the Laser Cutting room at MEAM. Jing was also sketching blueprint ideas for the whole team. Eventually we gave up our original design, which we called it Finger I. Finger I is using a lever to transform the popping-up motion of the solenoid to pressing down. We gave this up because the lever needs a rail to guide it when the servo moves. Without a rail, the lever won't be hold up straight. So we come up with Finger II, which is also shown below.

                    Finger I












                                                                                                               Finger II
We basically attached the servo rigidly to the structure on top and used the 5V small solenoid borrowed from Detkins Lab to do the pressing at the tip of the Finger.
The second milestone of the project is using a wand to change the tone of the sound. Jing is still working on it. The difficult part of this is that the mbed's pwm signal comes out from PIN p21 - p26, but the zigbee module MRF24J40MA is also using p21 and p22, causing the pwm output to fail during wireless transmission. Jing is trying to change the device driver for zigbee module MRF24J40MA making it using different PINs which will be p30 and p29. The wireless transmission is still not working properly. We can get two package flying through but no further. This needs to be taken seriously since it's important that we understand the intrinsic nature of Nano-RK by looking into the lower level codes.

November 13, 2013 (baseline 1 undergoing)

Fredy did a trial and error measurement on the key press process. He measured the arc distance between keys using single servo and solenoid. Claire was still working on the mechanical part. She literally did all the laser-cutting work at the MEAM Lab. Our group now has a single complete set of key pressing structure. Jing was refining the code on mbed with Nano-RK task scheduling issues remaining open. So far so good. We need to speed up on our project this weekend.

Jing

Novermber 9 2013

K-Mart shopping for Electronic Keyboard: 30 bucks.

Continued work on software to convert our music format (Key, Time To Next Key, Key Press Duration) into servo and solenoid setpoints. This was done successfully without the use of tasks and using the wait() function, however, this is poor practice as lots of CPU time is wasted. The nanoRK RTOS will be exploited to enable scheduling of wireless communication for the 'wand' and playing of a melody.

Also completed the structure to be used on solidworks and printed out a few DWG files with the laser cutter.

So far, still climbing up the hill.

G8/compDuctor