Remy the Rat

We finally got a model of Remy printed that we were satisfied with and we painted it to look like the rat. We added the servo motors to the back (glued it using a glue gun) and then added the LEDs. We wrote down the Arduino code for movement of the servo motors and to adjust brightness of the LEDs and soldered the wires so we could keep the battery-powered arduino in the pocket instead of a headband. We have a working model of Remy!

We worked on the Blender models - trying to create different version of Remy and 3D printing them. Once we had a model that looked like the rat we decided to make holes in the eyes so we could fit LEDs there and have space hollowed out in the back of the rat so that we could attach the servo motors there. Once we printed the rat we realised that the arms were too big and since we had just made donut like structures for the hands, it looked unrealistic. We will focus on these features to change and print the final model next week,

We focused this week on learning Blender, but faced serious time constraints due to midterms coming up and getting behind on homework. We started watching tutorials by "Blender Guru" on Youtube and don't think the process will actually be as hard as we were worried about. This should make it a lot easier to include slots for the LEDs and change the arm motor design. Additionally, we have decided to scale up the rat quite a bit.

After the meeting last week, we realized that editing the mesh file @shebuildsrobots has on her GitHub is not very feasible... when we tried to upload our CAD file to the 3D printing software (Orca), the design would change and random holes were added to Remy's head, and we had countless issues with spiraling and sizing. Instead, we opted to design the rat ourselves from the ground up using Blender. The focus for this week will be starting on Blender tutorials. Since this is a pretty major bottleneck in our project, we are cutting down on our goals to get rid of the accelerometers and are now instead going to have the arms move randomly using only the arduino nano every.