Hello Chordata community!
Myself and one other person (Matt, I think he'll be making an account here soon!) are going to be building a suit from scratch for a Senior Design Research Project. I'm a senior in an electrical engineering program, and this research design project is meant to challenge us to learn new skills and handle executing a project!
I found Chordata on hackaday back in 2018, and as soon as I saw it, I thought "Wow, very cool, how can I make one myself??" That was before going to school for my degree; now that I'm several years into that and needed to do the senior project anyway, it seemed like the stars were aligning. I'm someone with some experience in tinkering, primarily with lighting (controlling addressable LEDs) and building things with very simple motors, and I'm really excited to work with manufacturing custom boards in this project. I have never done that before. I do build other things (sculpture, mostly) so I'm at least familiar with the creative process of iteration.
We're going to be building the boards ourselves, and I'm really looking forward to absorbing all of your collective knowledge from the awesome WIP/Build Log threads that are already on the forum.
At the moment, all we've done is order the semi-conductors for the project - they're the hardest to find, and not being able to source them would have derailed the whole project from the get-go. Luckily for us, we were able to get everything - except for the I2C repeater chip. (That's the Texas Instruments TCA9517DGKR from the BOM). However, our professor advised us that we're likely to find a good replacement, so we went ahead with our ordering and are hoping to find a good substitute.
We also will be using the LSM9DS1, but on a breakout board from Sparkfun (product page here). It was the only form factor for the LSM9DS1 that we could find.
I know that these changes to the published BOMs will likely give us some trouble, but that learning experience is what we're here for! I'll make sure to post on our progress, and hopefully it will be helpful to the community.
I'm really looking forward to working on this!! Please drop a line and say hi, and if you see us about to shoot ourselves in the foot, please don't hesitate to say!
