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 #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

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 #13

By
Blog 2/6/2020 Progress for this week: Controls Team: The iPhone application code is being developed to work with a Bluetooth module. During this process other BLE modules are being considered as well. A bench model that includes all of the electronic components is also in the works. Once this is completed, the electronics will be integrated into the bogie for further testing.  Guideway Team: The original plan was to waterjet the unused plywood in the Superway Design Center; however, plans have slightly changed. We will be using a laser cutter instead of waterjet to manufacture components of the guideway. The laser cutter in the Makerspace is more accessible and does not require supervision during use. On the other hand, the waterjet requires supervision by staff members when they are available. To speed manufacturing, laser cutter as shown in Figure 1 was determined to be most efficient. Figure 1. Laser cutter in Makerspace. Figure 2. Plywood from Design Center cut b...
Post a Comment
Read more