Week Review 4/4/2024

Work on Float

This week was filling with some fairly unsuccessful debugging and some work on using the different motor driver. Next week I plan on really putting my head down and getting a PCB with the new motor driver.

I wanted to get the float ready for pool testing, but the motor driver that we are using keeps on overcurrenting. I tried to work around it, but it ended up being a waste of time. I could have spent that better just getting the new version working.

Schematic

I used the minimal setup from last week to get the board setup in KiCad. I plan on routing and testing this board next week. I decided to switch how the wiring will work to make it a little bit cleaner.

In the old wiring system power is coming in from a header that has 3.3v 5v and GND and a header with GND and 12v. I consolidated this into one header with GND 3.3v 5v and 12v in that order. I want to make it count up to make it easier to know which is which.

Food Drive

A longstanding tradition at MVTHS is having a food drive. For the past 5 or so years Robotics as consistantly won, this year however Electrical put up a good fight. Aaron, Ben, Tanzurel, Will, and I all pooled together money to get a large load of cans because it is cheaper to buy it in bulk.

Together we got 200 cans which helped push us over the amount we needed to win. In the end, Robotics nearly doubled the amount of cans that Electrical in second place brought in. The school as a whole brought in over 1000 cans.

Development Environment

My home computer this week had an unfortunate incident. I was updating and during the kernal build stage my computer lost power. This corrupted the computer and it would not build afterword.

I considered using chroot to enter the installation and fix the issue, but I decided that my setup was cluttered enough that this might be a good time to reinstall anyway.

I made my fresh install of archlinux and when I moved my development environment configuration files over I learned that packer.nvim was no longer maintained. This week I made the switch to lazy.nvim which seems to be the most popular lua package manager.

Switching was mostly seamless. Lazy.nvim has some fairly good documentation