Skip to main content

Team Blog #15

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 clamp down onto the base of the track. All the material can be bought at home depot.


Bogie Team:
Four more parts of the pod were printed and assembled. Upon the assembly of the pod it was sound that some alerations to teh snapfit designs would have to be made. Although the team managed to assemble the pod, some parts of the snap fits fell off, and dissasembly was found to be difficult. To fix this the team will have to make some minor adjustments to the pod. The team has also continued to  work on a gearbox design that fits the bogie platform.

Figure 2. Physical assembly of the 3d printed pod. 


Plans for Next Week: 


For controls, more progress has to be made toward the BLE connection with the app. Also, the pixy cam should be integrated into the master Arduino code to recognize all station barcodes. Prior to integrating the pixy cam into the code, some barcode tests will be done in different lighting to address some concerns. The bogie team will make minor adjustments to the pod and print a second pod with the corrections. For Bogie, good progress should be made toward designing the gears and the snapfits on the bogie will also be adjusted. By next week, parts of the pod with the corrections should be printed. For the Guideway, manufacturing should proceed where the team previously left off. More progress should be made toward a completed CAD model of the track.


Written By:
Lissette Romero


February 21st, 2020

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Team Blog #11

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...

Team Blog #25

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 ...

Team Blog #13

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...