Hi there! RoboCam is a cinema-style robotic arm for phones being designed from scratch. It is essentially a mini-scale version of those expensive robotic camera rigs that are used in the film industry.
Progress:
I designed a really rough sketch of my vision on Onshape. Heres a link to the onshape project if you wanna play around with the model and feel free to drop in some suggestions :)
This is probably the longest I have worked on this project in a single sitting, and I’m happy to say that I reached the final stretch.
I have also finalized what the DeskBud will be programmed to do. I settled on the idea of using this hackpad as a VS Code shortcut pad to open the things we use the most in that program. I chose this use case because I’m sure there are a lot of programmers out here who may find this helpful. Yes, it’s not some niche use case — people may have done it before, but I wanted to focus more on its usefulness than trying to make something unique.
KiCad and Onshape crashes caused a loss of progress multiple times because of my low-end PC, forcing me to redo that part again.
Lack of knowledge on how to dimension the case using the PCB designs. It was a time-consuming process because I wasn’t aware of advanced measuring techniques that my peers commonly use.
Despite the issues, I managed to learn a lot from this project and im glad I chose this as my first hardware project (EVER).
See yall on the final ship post :]
Major progress with the microbit over the past 2 days. At the initial stage of programming the microbit, I struggled with planning an optimal logic that the application and the microbit script would follow to ensure minimal load on the operating system. My initial setup was based on using exisiting python libraries that access the media stream of the device and do the calculations necessary to display visuals on the microbit. One library that I experimented with is winmedia_controller, but the library was outdated and called enough dependencies to defeat the purpose of being a lightweight application.
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So for the implementations I have made so far, I decided that I will program the calculation logic using primitive methods and efficient libraries like numpy and use the windows SDK libraries to pull live media streams. This should make the application even more lightweight and still send reliable data to the microbit.
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Today, I focused on implenting the serial communication between the application and the microbit itself and I also programmed the buttons to control the media being played on the laptop. The microbit would jumble up the commands when I tested the connection at first, I spent a lot of time surfing through many websites and gpt conversation to find the route cause of this issue, only to find that 2 IDEs (one for microbit scripting, one for the application handling visuals) were fighting to listen to the same serial stream which glitched the serial output the microbit was giving. Thats a lesson learnt, ensure that the micrbit is strictly connected to one serial stream when playing with serial connections.
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Enjoy the timelapses :)
After some more research on other hackpack designs and parts provided by hackclub, I redesigned the schematic and added an OLED display to it with some changes to the PCB layout. I also experimented with adding a rotary encoder to the hackpad, but I later realized that it won’t be used much for its intended purpose I planned out. Some key things I learnt from this milestone of my project is familiarizing myself with the rules and design guidelines that hackclub and stardance have laid out to ensure my project is good to be shipped and receive the parts to build it.
Enjoy watching the timelapse attached :)
This is the starting point of my MediaBit project and so far, it’s been research and light coding. This first checkpoint aka my devlog :) is all about setting up the environment for developing this project further. It took me longer than usual to figure out the libraries because I ran into some issues importing them. It was a bit of struggle to figure them out because of how rusty I was with the commands. Some minor misconfigs on git too but I got them sorted out with the help of copilot.
On the brightside I got some coding on developing the basic logic for the microbit. here is a 25 minute prog session in 23 seconds: https://lapse.hackclub.com/timelapse/_FFAEa7uCVi0
Devlog - 1
First iteration of my PCB design for the hackpad. The key takeaway of this first iteration was how I got to learn more about the software (like KiCad) and understand how the designing process works.
I found it challenging to setup the application initially like importing the care packages and figuring out how to use the symbols properly.
Despite the challenges, I got the gist of using the application and now im exploring more features like using DRC Rule Checker to ensure my design doesn’t have any issues.
Ohhh! this is my first hardware project as someone who programs more often :)
