Week 5 – Hardware Delays and Strategic Replanning
This week was about making adjustments and re-evaluating the next steps. I decided to change my chartered Raspberry Pi 2 to a Raspberry Pi 5 instead. The Raspberry Pi 5 comes equipped with better storage and processing power—meaning that as long as I boot it up correctly, the final system will have significantly better speed and flexibility. The new Pi will arrive next week, and I’m excited to see how much smoother development will become with the upgrade.
I was also supposed to get to the camera piece, but I’ve been delayed there as well. I contacted the vendor to get my camera three weeks ago and have had no response. So, I decided to pivot and use one of the spare cameras in the lab for the prototype, and I will implement the better one when things are more stable in the future. This should allow me to keep building without letting delays stop progress entirely.
Since I was delayed this week, I had time to integrate everything and plan ahead. Returning to the motor circuit, I sensed that wiring the Pi 5 to make adjustments for my motors would complicate things significantly—especially with the timing and control precision required. Thus, instead of forcing that integration, I plan on uploading my control program to the spin coater via a direct PC connection.
With this course of action in mind, I reached out to Ossila, the manufacturer of the spin coater, to see if there was any way to talk to the system myself. Luckily, they got back to me with an all-inclusive yet simple response on how I could upload my code, thus avoiding complicated hardware problems of my own.
This week may have appeared relatively unproductive since no new equipment was in my possession yet, but in reality, I had a productive week of replanning and problem-solving. I’m better situated now to jump back into development once the new pieces arrive.