the parts came! literally all of today was spent assembling the drive system as my partners were drilling the holes and cutting the shafts for the wheels, pivots, and spring dowels. we’ve unfortunately found out that the belt drives skip kind of a lot, so hopefully this doesn’t cause issues with driving under torque when we get to that… (i swear if this is foreshadowing)
we also went out to Reflect Orbital today!! seeing the mirrors was incredibly cool, and the material they made it out of felt really interesting. something about its very small thickness (2.8 microns!!) made it feel like it was barely on your finger if you weren’t looking at it. In addition, I talked to one of the software engineers (shoutout Alfonso) about how they get the software done, including things like:

• Double buffering updates (seemingly called ABing) to make sure that no update permanently breaks the system
• Using the Yocto project to make a custom Linux kernel for their embedded systems
• Monolithic applications vs. a more service based approach that also goes hand in hand with…
• Error handling and making sure that something like an illegal instruction won’t crash your expensive space satellite
• Testing with the ground-sat (all of the components on the real satellite connected together on a table in a room) and an approach that involves uploading the changed code to the ground-sat every night and running a whole test suite to make sure none of the changes broke anything and that they (hopefully) achieved what they were written for
  overall it was pretty damn cool you should check out Reflect :3
  below is one of the legs, and as you can see theres a whole belt going from the motor to the wheel!