Arm + Motor Troubles

So! For the past couple of days I got the arm to slowly pick up objects, the video for it is somewhere stuck in mail server hell, but I do have the program. Among other things is my trouble/frustration with my motor circuit (shown above). I contacted the creator of the Chefbot, which is what Fetch's motor and frame is based off of. Hopefully he (Lentin Joseph) has some insightful suggestions! I'll eventually post the video of the arm in use...

Here's a screen-shot of the code for the arm + ultrasonic sensor (the arm grabs stuff based on the distance from the ultrasonic sensor)

I'm especially pleased with my function for slowing down the servos when they move, the function works perfectly! I've seen some other more complicated solutions, but I feel as if mine is quite simple and effective.

Basically it's just this:

For(int servoAngle = 0; servoAngle < servoPosition; servoAngle++){
    servo.write(servoAngle);
    break;
}

Late Night Progress Update

Due to my long hours at work I don't have much time every night and staying up past midnight doesn't result in the best quality progress...

But I digress, today I tested out the ultrasonic and its readings with the Arduino IDE, it works fine, except for one big problem. The pom pom seems to bounce off/disperses the sound waves so the readings return -1, nothing is detected. In order to fix this I simply made a new target out of green card-stock, a 4 cm by 4 cm by 4 cm cube.

The arm itself is working fine after testing it out with an old program of mine that allows a user to manually control the arm's servo with keyboard inputs. I need to figure out the right sequence for the shoulder and elbow to move in order for the claw to be position in front of the target cube to grab it without hitting the target cube while the arm lines itself up.

I found out a crude hack for connecting the lipo battery to the breadboard with some simple jumper wires. However, I'm still waiting for a proper charger for the battery to arrive from shipping. I tested if the buck converter was still outputting 5 V with my multimeter since the lipo battery pumps out around 15 V (out of the box) and the buck converter is returning a close 4.9 V.

That's about it for tonight! I'll post some pictures of the new target object with the arm and the battery in the morning.