Week 10 Update

 Chris and Natalie: 

- Our unit's task was to work on the crutches and body attachment for our project's first prototype assembly.

- After dissembling the crutches for parts, we realized that we now have more of the push buttons that we ordered separately with the aluminum tubing. We made marks for where we will cut for manufacturing the prototype. The bottom adjustable part of the crutches will be used between the hip motors to the passive knee joints and below the knee part way down the lower leg. The wider portion of tubing from the crutches will be used for the back support along with the belt. 

- Stepper motor is super heavy and bulky which might complicate design, so we are figuring out how to orient it with the metal bars. 

- We are going to focus on the design from the knee up for the first prototype, because attaching the motor and correctly distributing that torque is the first priority. For our first design we are going to manufacture one leg of the exoskeleton and get that working before we try to design an additional leg.

Image above was during the disassembly of the crutches.

Mohammed and Brad: 

- Our goal for the group was developing the code required to manipulate the motor segments, and to produce a sound circuitry for all the inter-workings of the Gearbox. 

 - The code in itself came down to finding a efficient frame or skeleton that would fit the project and one that can work along side the encoder of our choosing.

- During this week the driver was then soldered into place to give us the edge in manipulating its current when needed. The motor itself was surprising thicker then expected but slightly concerning, but manageable if needed.

- Major objective from here out is building a functioning circuit for the gearbox in order to test future code on it for adjustment.

Cameron:

-My goal was to evaluate the available gearboxes and make a decision on what to purchase.

-After research it was determined that a planetary gearbox would be most beneficial as it can provide a high gear reduction, can be backdriven, and is reasonably priced. A 50:1 reduction was chosen as it came closest to the torque requirement for our project, pictured below.