During today's class, I worked on improving and finalizing the design of the legs of my walker robot. To ensure that the legs would be strong enough to hold the weight of the robot (around 950 grams and no more than 1 kg), I decided to use a multilayered leg design. The leg now consists of two separate upper leg  (most likely made of thick material around 5-6mm thick) and 3 separate lower legs (made of thinner materials around 3-4mm thick). I also doubled the amount of linkage for the leg to further reinforce its overall integrity. 

I cut out a wooden mockup of the whole to test out its functionality. Testing showed that the design was viable and I proceeded to build the actual leg in preparation for the arrival of the stepper motors 

After much reflection last night, I decided to try to print my legs using the 3D printer. I chose to do so because this building method provided me with a hard and wear resistant material. However, one of the 3D printers did not operate correctly and I was unable to print out the lower legs. Nonetheless, I believe that 3D printing the legs will provide me with the best legs I could build with the materials available to me. 

In the meantime, I made further research on how to control stepper motors. While discussing with Asli, I learned that I should use the Raspberry Pi microprocessor instead of the Arduino Uno. For most of the day, I was perplexed at how I could link all 8 stepper motors to the Raspberry Pi to control them and provide power for them. After a long time looking online, I found a link that could provide me with some insight of how I could control all 8 of the stepper motors. 

Link: https://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-CNC-Hat-Controlled-CDROM-Stepper-Moto/

Next week, I plan on learning more on how to control the stepper motors. If the motors I ordered arrive next week, then I will proceed to assemble the whole robot first before moving on to the coding. For the body, I plan on using thin wood to create boards for the motors. The whole robot would be assembled using metal screws to ensure structure integrity