135: An Engineering Meeting

The title today is in reference to a couple things. Today was the Wind Power PDR, or Preliminary Design Review, which was great, and we go a lot of great feedback from it.

It was a little exhausting, but I honestly think I've gotten really good at this whole public speaking thing, and I'm really happy with how my leadership skills have turned out, especially in the context of Wind Power, where I'm the de facto knowledge-haver for our electrical system, which is both a fun and stressful position to hold.

After PDR I came home and (after grabbing a package from the package center) played video games with my brother Seth for a good hour and a half, which was really nice. Seth doesn't often stoop to spending his time with his nerdy brother (myself), but it's always fun to play some video games with him. We were playing The Crew: Motorfest, which is a huge multiplayer racing game, and lends itself really well to playing in teams, so it's perfect for us.

After that I opened the package (which was a remote for my electric skateboard!) and got to work getting it running again. I worked on that up until about 30 minutes ago, because it was a NIGHTMARE. The Odrive (old robotics controller I have) runs on spaghetti-code and dreams, so none of the things I need are working (it keeps throwing encoder errors), and the I got it spinning without the encoder, because sensorless motor operation is entirely possible, but I could only get one of them started, and then if I stopped it, it wouldn't restart again. Marcus, one of the 2nd floor residents that hangs out with me and the squad, is helping me troubleshoot it, but we couldn't get the firmware to upgrade (we thought maybe that was the problem), and now the system won't show up for either of us at all. We might have to do a more extreme hard reset, which is just so cool.

I'm losing faith that this implementation will work at all, but it's no fault of mine, nor Marcus's. I'm something like 30 hours of soldering and troubleshooting into this, and the most I've got is still just a single motor, spinning at a constant rate. The Odrive is just so poorly documented, and much of the documentation is simply wrong or inapplicable, it makes it really difficult to use.

There was a stretch of time earlier where the Odrive decided that the command odrv0.save_configuration(), which does exactly what it sounds like it does (saves config, reboots) returned a False from the controller. I would send it the command to restart, and it would just... refuse?!? Unhinged controller behavior.

I'm really glad I did end up buying that backup controller from BKB, because I'm fairly certain now that I'll end up using it., which sucks a little bit, because it won't be a cool custom solution, but it will also WORK, which is probably the most important part. That system didn't have any major flaws once I got the braking figured out, and once I waterproof the whole thing it'll be just about bombproof.

Hopefully that gets shipped out this week, it's coming from New York, and when I ordered the temporary deck from them it took like 2 and a half weeks to arrive, but that was a UPS blunder, hopefully this time it's a reasonable shipping window (I'm really hoping sometime this week, my mobility is seriously limited, and I really want this thing working over Thanksgiving break so I can use it then).

The other part of the "engineering meeting" is me doing a good friend of mine a favor; Sam, an EE I've had a few classes with, and a good friend, is taking part in a startup-pitching competition, and wanted me to 3D-print him a prototype of the design for him to show off (tomorrow), and like, of course! We printed out his first design at ~10:15, realized that wouldn't work at all for what he was going to do, redesigned it, and then printed a new one that finished at ~1:45.

We also went and found Sam's knife, from first year, which was still hidden in the roof tiles of the Santa Lucia 3rd Floor Evens hallway, which was absolute gold. He had a friend of his hide it, because he left without it, and then the friend flew home, and couldn't bring the knife, so he hid it in the ceiling tiles. Sam had the video of where exactly the knife ended up, so we cross-referenced, and I pulled it out, exactly where the video said it was, which was hilarious.

He was also fully aware of our awesome bathroom ceiling beer gauntlet, as he was one of the participants in "the beer olympics" that took place 2 years ago.

It is 1:25 AM as I write this, and I got like 7 hours of sleep last night (had a Monster this morning though, so I was okay), so I should be getting to bed.