Over the past week, we have had four main advances. The first of which was prepping wire connections between the 24 Easy Drivers and the 24 motors. Each Easy Driver + Motor connection requires a set of four wires. We had previously crimped the all wires on one end for connection to the Easy drivers. This week, we soldered the other end of all the wires to 24 D-Subs, to which the motors will plug into. These D-Subs will be mounted on an acrylic board and hermetically sealed on Monday next week with a silicon-based product.
Next, we removed the barrel jack connector from the Arduinos by de-soldering the connections. Beneath them were the raw terminals that corresponded to ground and live power. We then soldered wires to these terminals for each of the Arduinos. One Arduino had less metal left on the terminals from when the power jack was removed, but large amounts of solder enabled the connections to be reestablished. After the Arduinos were soldered, we plugged in their wires to the power source and attached the to the shelf, as seen in the video. Turning on the power yielded green lights on all of them, indicating a successful first step! In the next few days we will add connectors to the Arduino wires for easy removal and troubleshooting.
Additionally, as mentioned earlier, we obtained an acrylic board to replace the top of our box. This was done so that the motors could easily be connected or disconnected from the waterproof box. This ultimately adds another step of customization to the project. Holes were cut in the acrylic to the exact size of the waterproof D-Sub connectors and 4 stop buttons. The stop buttons were prepared by soldering a power line through both terminals of the button, once again furthering the modularity of this project by allowing for shut-off of power to sets of 6 of the Easy Drivers.
Lastly, we created and received more 3D-printed components of the project. This includes the shelf for the four Arduinos, the shelf for the power converter, and the slots for the Easy Drivers. However, there was a problem with the shelf prints, due to the designs being made from the measurements from a different layout schematic. Therefore, we updated the spacing of the shelves to accommodate the Easy Drivers beneath. Also, the Easy Driver slots were too loose for the Easy Drivers in the first iteration, but our second iteration was sufficient to fit the 24 Easy Drivers securely.
