Week 6: Getting Started

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This week we did two very important things: started building the actuator and got the stepper motor running, finally. It took a couple of weeks but we finally are able to run the motor. On top of being able to run it, we figured out how to control the speed and direction which will help us controlling the actuator once its running. Since we finally had all the parts we needed for the actuator, we started building it. We put the linear bearings on a mount and aligned them so that they were parallel. We started to build clamps to hold the rods down but did not finish cutting them. We also made the decision to not cover the whole frame in wood. To make it easier for us and to make the internals more accessible once build, we decided we would cover it on cardboard.
The first picture is the beginning of the actuator which we completed this week. The second picture is a rough sketch of the TV frame with the cardboard and also sketch of the wiring and what we used to get the stepper motor working.


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