GEOGame

We've taken some extra time to add improvements to the project. We took a new driver (it was the reason why the motor was stuttering and not working previously) for the stepper and finally changed the card to a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. That allowed us to use the RPi.GPIO library which is much simpler and well optimized. The code for the Motor works flawlessly and we can now turn in both ways (backward and forward), we've also added a command to turn off the driver completely after the code ends so that the stepper doesn't overheat and bug. We have a working code for the LEDs but they just won't light up, we're afraid we burnt them and we don't have an extra band at disposal. We also made a couple tweaks so that it's easier to troubleshoot issues, part are much more easier to disassemble. Here's a working video of the final project : Final Project.

Unfortunately the code not being well optimized because of the gpiod library, the card and the stepper overheating overtime, it created some problems. The motor that was spinning over 512 steps per revolution was stuttering and was spinning over a random number of step which made the x-axis completely inaccurate: Stuttering motor.

We made quite some progress, we worked in parallel on the code and on the wiring. We encountered serious difficulties when using the Libre Le Potato card as it doesn't accept common Raspi libraries for the GPIOs so beware when you're using the gpiod library as it is not well optimised and uses lib libraries which are not always updated. But we finally managed to make the motor spin after a long night : Spinning Motor Video (don't mind us whispering, it was very late)

In the end, we stayed with the idea of making the globe spin from above. We started to work on the physical parts of our project. Using a couple planks, we made a sturdy wooden structure that will hold the motor from above. We've also manually bent a metallic bar in order to make an arch that will hold the LEDs inside the globe.

The tkinter library is great for positionong each component where you just need to specify at which pixel you would like to place a button or a label. However, functionality-wise, it's quite bad, we discovered that there was a problem with the button functions as they are executed without the buttons being even clicked. We tried a lot of solutions found on the Internet but nothing worked. Our last resort is to change libraries and go with PyQt5. Now this library isn't great for placing components as the only way to do so is through layouts. However the buttons work perfectly. After a bit of work, we found the perfect layout for our interface. We decided to remove the score as our main priority was to finish more important things such as the rotation of the LEDs or the motor spinning.

After further reflection, we noticed that our major issue would probably be the rotation, we are delaying the building part of our project because we're trying to anticipate on other issues. We've had new ideas like making the globe spin horizontally which would remove the risk of the globe falling if it is held from the top, plus who said that the North was up and  not on the side. Another idea was given by one of our supervisors, advising us to use a wheel brushing the side of the globe to make it spin and a potentiometer to track the position. Correcting positional error caused by the wheel wouldn't be a huge issue. 

The first iteration of our interface using the tkinter library. For now the only functionality is changing the button labels when clicking on them but we'll add the other functionalities later on.

For now we've just made a few drawings, to have a general idea of what we want to do. We still don't know wether the globe will be spinning from the bottom or the top. We had a few other ideas as you can see below :