Skip to main content

Team Blog #5

By
Team Blog #3
What we have completed:
This week the Progress was made on the guideway and with controls. The controls team focused on writing some preliminary Arduino scripts and developing the interface of the app that will be used. Using some of the sensors and motors that we already have. The controls team was able to roughly simulate what the the motors on the pods will be doing. Using the apple programming language swift, the team was able to begin developing a basic layout of what the interface will look like. The only issue that the controls team is currently facing is how to use swift on non mac laptops.

The Guideway Team focused on determining the best design for supporting the guideway rails with the base piece. There are two options that have been considered so far. The first option consists of a rectangular stand (2X4 wood) with a slot as seen in Figure 1 part 2. There will be an aligner tool as shown in Figure 2 that is used to clamp down the track to the rectangular stand. Option 2 would consist of using a PVC pipe with a threaded stud inside to screw down into the base board as shown in Figure 1 part 4. 
There are some issues with each option considered. The first issue is how to eliminate any drastic wobbling that can take place in either design. By having good connections between the base and stand as well as the stand and rails, we reduced the amount of shaking while the bogie traverses the track. The second issue would be how to deal with fractures and cracks close to critical connection points. 

 Next Steps:
For the Controls Team, the next steps will be to buy the research different bluetooth modules, and buy the one that best suits our needs. Another that must be done next week, is the purchase of all the other sensors that the team will need. This will allow for further development of both the final arduino script and the app.
The next goal for the Guideway Team would be to prototype a few components from both designs and see which performs better.
Figure 1. Parts 1 and 2 show the 2x4 wood support. Parts 3 and 4 show the PVC support.
Figure 2. The aligner tool will slide into the slot on the track and wood support.

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 #21

By
SSST Blog 4/15/2020 During this week's class meeting, all teams met with prof Furman to discuss the engineering ethics assignment. We had a very thoughtful discussion as a class in answering ethical questions about the Boeing 737 disaster and how engineers could have prevented it, by applying the engineering ethics. We discussed that three main engineering ethics were violated; the Fundamental canon, the Informed Consent, and the precautionary principle. We also discussed the best solution to take as an engineer if you found a problem at work that will have the potential to put people's lives in danger. After the discussion was over, we had some time as a team to discuss the progress of our work. Last week, the team presented their second presentation of the semester, and a lot of progress was done. The team went over the tasks that were a little behind and discussed how we will approach simulating our work using softwares like Solidworks. For bogie: Julio was able...
Post a Comment
Read more