Ben Grumann’s Work Log

Week 3 Update:
This week the HMI team met and decided to use a Raspberry Pi to create out HMI, as they are open source, and very simple. Raspberry Pi also has a touchscreen that is designed to work directly with a Pi which will simplify the complication interfacing two separate hardware’s might lead to. Josh currently has one which allows us to get started without needing to wait for the ability to order one. We decided to use a library called guizero which is an extension of tkinter. This allows us to use two different levels of capabilities to expand our usage of the HMI. We went through a quick tutorial webpage to learn all the basics of guizero, and were able to create a simple UI window. We found a way to make the whole UI window full screen but need to work on finding a straight forward way to close it (I will put the command in here once I have a copy of the code). We were also able to allow for additional popups that would prevent work on the previous screen until the popup is closed (Also will put the code snippet here). We also discussed the possibility of dropping 480V power into the lab room to allow for a standard ABB robot controller to work at spec. If this is not a possibility we talked to our sponsor to get a smaller controller to use. If this is the route we need to go we might not be able to use joint 1 (the base swivel) on the arm.