Robots can get very complicated and have lots of moving components. A lot of the time after a CAD file has been made for a part, it might not get fabricated because it gets lost in the hundreds of other part files. This can create massive delays in the build process and given that we only have 6 weeks to build the robot, it can be detrimental to our season. That is why for my final project I created a simple parts tracker for a high school robotics team to know what part of the design cycle their parts are in.
My java program lets the user create a mechanism and add both Custom Parts and COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) parts to that mechanism.
In addition to assigning parts to the mechanism, it can also track the mechanism through whichever stage of the build process it is currently in. For example if a custom part has been CADed, CAMed, but has not yet been fabricated, the program will print this information to the user. This makes it very easy to know exactly where the parts are for a given assembly at any given moment thus ensuring that every part gets fabricated.
At first my project was very difficult because I picked a topic that was a little too complex to do with only in class knowledge. But after I decreased the scope of my project from the entire robot to one subsystem it became a lot more manageable for my knowledge.
I thought it was pretty fun overall as I got to work on something meaningful for robotics while at the same time getting credit for it as my final project. My project might be used as the framework for an actual CAD parts tracker for the robotics team. I am pretty proud of the final project because I spent a lot of time and effort getting it to work the way I wanted it to. I am also very excited to explain how my Parts tracker works to the programmers on the team so that we can try to create a more refined version to be used in season.
I definitely learned to not overextend the scope of my project because we have not learned the concepts required to make our projects very complex, but this also leaves some room for improvements in the second semester. Another thing that I learned is that I should begin by making the code work, instead of starting with the requirements. One thing that would have been helpful to know in preparation for the project would be to just code your project first and worry about filling in all the requirements later. If you have a working model of what you would like to do it becomes a lot easier to just add in things to get all the requirements done.