Week Review 6/6/2024

Introduction

This week I made a lot of progress on the float. It is very nearly ready for the world championship. This week I made finishing touches to the float PCBs and we ordered them. I also made some edits to the shop image and the image on my own computer.

I also worked on getting our documentation quality for the float up to a good enough level that people on the robotics team are going to be able to use the float that has not worked on it. Unfortunately neither Ben nor I will be able to make it to the world championship.

Work On PCBs

I added a silk screen and made sure that the electronics were correct. I then wanted to do a quality control test because we really only get one shot with these boards before the world championship.

I did a quality control test for the mechanical aspects of the board by laser cutting a model of the boards outline. I did this by exporting from Kicad as a SVG rather than a GBR file, I then imported the output into inkscape and changed the stroke to 0.1 px.

The laser cut test piece fit perfectly, so I ordered the PCB.

Fixing Python Installation

After trying to run some Python scripts I noticed that the Python installation on my workstation was actually the Python installation from Inkscape. This version is out of date and not compatible with the pip installation on the workstation.

I found that the issue was due to the PATH environment variable in Windows has inkscape/bin rather than the Python path first. I could not find the inkscape variable in my path in the control panel so I used the quick and dirty solution of uninstalling inkscape and reinstalling without the python installation in inkscape.

This breaks compatibility with extensions in Inkscape, but I figured that Inkscape extensions are a much more rare use case then Python packages. I also made this change to the shop image so Python will work out of the box on all machines in the shop.