Welcome to SOHA! Today was our first meeting assembling, and the goal was simple: get familiar with the components we ordered, and make sure nobody ends up sitting around waiting on somebody else. We mapped out the project timeline and assigned everyone a specific role so our work time actually stays productive.
Every part we ordered finally came in. Roughly $300 worth of hardware we all contributed. Some notable mentions were our twelve 20kg Feetech serial bus servos, which will pull the tendons running through each finger, and the 40kg servo in charge of forearm roll. That one gets the extra torque because it has to rotate the entire hand and the motor bank behind it as a single unit; a Raspberry Pi Pico, a power supply, a driver board, and the small stuff that ties it all together.
Most of the day went into blueprinting the website. The first real decision was whether to use a builder like Wix or Framer, or write the code ourselves. We went with coding it from scratch. It's slower up front, but it gives us full control over the animations and layout we have in mind.
Here's what we decided to include:
Home page. A detailed robotic hand, moving, is the first thing you see when the page loads. It sets the tone and makes the site feel alive instead of static.
Blog section. The thing you're reading right now. Photos and videos of our progress, organized into separate posts by phase, so anyone can follow the build from the first phase to the finished hand, and we can track our own progress as well.
Video/Photo library. Timelapses of build days, clips of us training the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to read signs through a webcam, and closer looks at the parts of the project that are hard to explain in text.