CAKEBOT: "Demo Day is Coming" I

After the DRII, we took our compliments and criticism to heart and set off to finish what we said we would do before the final Demo Day. Griffin and I looked into the malfunctioning rotating platform and realized the issue was more mechanical than anything electrical or software: Cassie and Emily made note to handle the issue in our final prototype.

Griffin and I worked heavily on integrating the pyserial code with the Arduino system: he came up with the genius idea of having the pyserial/GUI send three-letter codes that correspond with motor actions, i.e. calibration of the platform stepper, forward movement of the top stepper, extruding of the top DC, extruding of the side DC motor. We were able to record all our changes of the final sprint code using GitHub -- a cloud management system for sharing and collaborating on code. Griffin introduced me to the system and I plan on using it much more often now that I understand its magic.

Furthermore, in testing all the motors, I was able to redefine our haphazardly drawn schematic diagram in Lucidchart and I ensured that our Pololu Driver was set-up correctly along with the other pins for the Arduino Uno. Cassie and Emily worked more on the CAD drawings and laser-cutting the necessary mechanical components needed to integrate our second Wilton Decorator Plus for generating a bottom border. Although the side border did not need high resolution in forming patterns, the top-frosting-decorator would need to represent any small, close bumps/curves drawn in the GUI. However, the thinnest tip we had (a filling nozzle) differed greatly in length from the other tips and our team questioned how to go about such. I looked into thin tips, with the standard length, at nearby Michael's and found several online in stock. The others who had a car were unable to make the trip out there, so we settled on accounting for the height difference in positioning the decorator higher. We have yet to implement and test all these changes but are quite confident that they can be easily integrated.

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