Skip to main content

Team Blog #3

By
Team Blog #3 
September 25, 2019 

Presentation Recap:

This week the Small Scale team presented solutions for improving the guideway, bogie, and controls. The bogie will be improved by changing the switch mechanism to latch onto the third rail to prevent the bogie from falling through any gaps in the guideway as shown in Figure 1. The guideway will be improved by laser cutting plywood, which would allow for precision among each track piece.




Figure 1. Bogie latching onto right side of third rail. 
The bogie will be slightly redesigned to incorporate a two piece snap on to avoid taking apart the track as shown in Figure 2. The wheels of the bogie will be improved by adding friction tape.



Figure 2. Snap-Fit design for the two-piece bogie.


In addition, the controls team will make an iOS phone application developed in Xcode to control the bogie. The bogie will use a PixyCam to determine each direction to take and for locating each station. The PixyCam and an ultrasonic sensor will be used to prevent the bogies from colliding with each other.


Agenda for this week:

After discussing with Professor Furman, the guideway will need to be attached in a way that allows for the pieces to be easily interchanged. The design will need to be similar to Bill James mini scale track as shown in Figure 3 and Jacques design, shown in Figure 4.

Figure 3. Bill James mini model track piece design square slot. 

Figure 4. Jacques 10 meter track design using plywood. 
Figure 5.  Plywood precisely cut using Waterjet at Makerspace.

The holes in the plywood as shown in Figure 5 will be used for alignment and bolting down each piece.


The controls team will research into developing the iOS app and working with the PixyCam as shown in Figure 6. More research will be done on each sensor used as well. 


Figure 6. PixyCam used for collision detection and navigating along guideway. 


Next Steps:

 The next steps for the Small Scale team are to continue designing components for the guideway and bogie in SolidWorks. As well as developing a sensor stack for the bogie's control system and researching into the processing power of the PixyCam. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team Blog #15

By
Progress for this week: Controls Team: To become more familiar with the Pixy Cam several tests were conducted throuhgout the week. After the team decided to switch over to barcodes for the stations the team saw that this method was better. A sheet of the 10 barcodes was then printed out and the team tested how accurate the pixy cam was at ientifying the different codes. The team will is now working on trying to develop a test which will incorporate the arduino along with the other electrical componenets. Figure 1: Barcode recognition by Pixy2 Guideway Team: The guideway team made progress on determining how the track will be supported and what materials we will use to build it. The team setteled on using mdf wood with a thickness of .25". The laser cutter cuts the wood accurately and precisely at the maker space, however, the space is only available during the week days from 10am to 6pm. The supporting stands will use 3ft long zinc threaded rods with nots and washers to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Team Blog #25

By
SSST Blog 5/13/20 Progress for the week: Since this is essentially the last blog for the 2019/2020 academic year, and the last major thing that was accomplished this week was submitting the report, there is not that much individual subteam work that was completed. Rather, everyone came together to work on the final report throughout the entirety of the last week. The remainder of this blog will be dedicated to showcasing the final results through images of each of the subteams and also of the Small-Scale as a whole. Controls Team  The final design of the controls team was two separate iOS apps, one allowing to connect and to send data to BLEs to activate the master Arduino code and another solely for a pleasant and informative UI experience. Although ultimately a keyboard was not able to be implemented successfully into the BLE testing app, a slider was added so that depending on its position, different 8-bit unsigned integer values (within a range specified in Xcode) can be ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Team Blog #19

By
SSST Blog 3/26/2020 Progress for this week: The Small Scale team met this week to discuss our plan moving forward with our project after the recent changes that are going on. The team decided to continue meeting online via Zoom or Google Hangout to discuss our progress. The meetings will be happening every week. This week we also met as a class with Dr. Furman. We explained our plan with him and explained our schedule that is shown below in figure 1. The schedule shows the main goals of our team for the rest of the semester. Plans for next week Next week is spring break, but the team is still planning to meet to encourage ourselves to meet the deadlines that we set. For controls, the Arduino code will implement the switching mechanism servos. By adding this, the Arduino code will be complete and ready to be used along with the iOS app. The next step for the iOS app is adding a text box that allows the user to type data that can be sent to the BLE. More thing is planned to...
Post a Comment
Read more