Skip to main content

Team Blog #6

By
SSST Blog 10/17/19

 Progress for the week:
Controls Team 
This weeks progress was similar to last weeks. The controls team focused on two separate tasks. Lissette and Asmaa continued to develop the test code for the motor and ultrasonic sensors. The purpose of this code is to simulate what would happen if two bogies get too close to one another, in which case the ultrasonic sensors would detect this and slow down the motor of the bogie that is getting too close to the other bogie. There were some issues with the code last week, so this week kinks were continued to be worked out. A snippet of the Arduino code can be seen below in figure 1:

Figure 1: Snippet of code to control motor speed using ultrasonic sensor 

The space where the small scale team works was also searched for useful components. While Lissette and Asmaa were working on this, I (Julio) was working on the iOS app. So far I am just learning the basics of the programming language Swift by watching courses on YouTube. I have the basic layout for the app set up, however I am still learning a lot of new things and progress will be made in the following weeks to have more complete app, at least in terms of the user experience. Once the app layout is good to go, the focus will shift to being able to connect the app to the pods via a bluetooth module on the Arduino. As of right now, I picked a tabbed app style which means that the app will have multiple tabs of information in it. The three main tabs as of right now are home, search, and view map. More tabs will be added, probably reaching a total of 6 tabs (still haven't decided). The following images depict what the app looks like in this very early development stage:


Figure 2: App icon on home screen                    Figure 3: App loading screen

Figure 4: Home tab of app                                         Figure 5: Order pod tab of app

Figure 6: Map tab of pods

Guideway Team
The guideway team continued to expand on last weeks progress and planned some physical models to be ready by next Wednesday's presentation. They plan on gaining access to a 3D printer and printing the tools for clamping down their guideway design. They are also looking into printing some rails if they find a printer with a long enough heating bed. Going forward, bogie upgrades will be designed to incorporate a quick disassemble capability. A decision will also be made on whether the bogie will be all-wheel drive or two-wheel drive.  

Team As a Whole
The team as a whole made plans to meet this Saturday to work on the presentation for next week and begin working on the bogie as well. 

Plans for next week
Next week we are planning on improving from our first presentation and demonstrating the progress we have made thus far. There is also a plan for the controls team to look into purchasing a pixie cam. I will also continue working on the iOS app.

Written by:
Julio de Pereda Banda
17 October, 2019 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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 #11

By
SSST Blog 10/17/19 Progress for the week: Controls Team  This week for the controls team, Asmaa continued working on combining the two main Arduino codes which we have so far. One of the codes was the one which implemented the ultrasonic sensor to get the motor to slow down if the ultrasonic sensor detected an object too close to it. This mimics what we want the bogies and pods to do once they are fully operational, it is essentially collision prevention system to where if a pod gets too close to another pod, the ultrasonic sensors will detect the proximity, and get the motor to slow down. The other Arduino code which we have is for the BLE. Using a pre mad app to test if the BLE works, Asmaa wrote a code to enable the Arduino to turn an LED on and off depending on the input of the user on the app. If we typed 1, the LED would turn on and if we typed 0, the LED would turn off. Asmaa combined both of these codes into one, with the slight difference that once we have our own iO...
Post a Comment
Read more