Physics Project
Our AP Physics teacher loves having us work on independent projects throughout the year. For one of them, my group made a robotic arm, and instead of having it pick up objects like in a lot of the videos out there, I programmed it to be able to write anything (at least, under 7 letters long) with a marker. It's made of an Arduino, a few servos, and some 3D printed parts (which I received just a few days before the deadline 😥).
Demo Link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wpd-TouCS1XBPbLzx_5I9V8gfi3Biccl/view?usp=sharing
Link to Code
How I built it (what's the stack? did I run into issues or discover something new along the way?)
At first, I had the arm draw preset shapes with defined coordinates (which are then translated to polar, then into servo positions with inverse kinematics), but when I tried moving onto letters, the Arduino didn't have enough storage to remember cartesian coordinates for all 26 letters. So, I came up with a 3x3 grid system, with each node being labeled 1-9, then defined each letter using an array of nodes to form a path. These paths can then easily be translated into coordinates on the paper, depending on the position of the letter.
Additional Thoughts / Feelings / Stories
I plan to add more customization to the writing, maybe create a variable font size. I already did this manually in testing but didn't get around to making it full-fledged function, since it was already midnight before presentation day 😛
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