DEVLOG #10

What I did

In this devlog, I really just updated some of the things I had already implemented. First, I remodeled the wheels from gears to regular smooth wheels. This is because I had the idea of using those silicone wristbands as the tank treads instead of timing belts. This would not only be more accessible, but it would also make OTIS much more customizable and, in my opinion, look much better. This is because the silicone bands are thicker than the timing belts, which means the tank treads are larger. I also installed another AI model, qwen3-VL:4b, because I believed it would have better image analysis. I tested out all the models to find the best one, and I think I will use qwen3-vl:4b for this project, as it was able to recognize pictures and follow instructions more accurately than Llava. Lastly, while testing the models, I realized the prompting was a bit tedious when using the camera, since I would have to take a photo each time I prompted the AI. So I revised the code so that it would ask if you wanted to take a photo. If you say “photo”, it will ask you to position the camera and send the prompt. If you don’t want to take a photo, you just put the prompt in the first question, and it will default to no-photo mode for that prompt.

Challenges

Modeling the wheels

This wasn’t really one large problem, more so multiple smaller ones. You see, I had already completed the 3d model with the gears instead of the wheel. This meant that changing the wheels would alter the whole model. For this reason, I was contemplating whether this would be the right choice, as I would also have to fix the animation. But I decided to do it anyway. The main problem was that the wheels have a much larger diameter than the gears. So if I were to just replace them, it would look extremely disproportionate. So, I had to remodel the servo slot and the front axles by placing them closer together and moving them up. Once I completed this, I had to redo the whole animation because the old one did not fit the new wheels well. But after all this, I was able to reupload the new files to the GitHub repo and begin fixing the code.

What is next

The next thing I am going to do is test out the tool. I wrote up a simple tool in Python that would allow the AI to send data that controls the servos, but I have not tested it yet, which is what I will be doing next. I will also likely wire up the servos and continue testing other models to try to find a good setup. Thank you.