Skip to main content

Team Blog #17

By
SSST Blog 3/4/20

Progress for the week:

 Controls Team:

 The controls team this week made significant progress with the pixy cam. The cam is now integrated into the main arduino code with the BLE, ultrasonic, and motor. The program waits for an input from the BLE then looks for the corresponding bar code, as shown in Figure 1., using the pixy while running the motor. It stops when the bar code is found. 


Figure 1: Bar codes that the Pixy cam will recognize as different stations. 

 The blog man who wrote the guide to connect the iOS app to the BLE also responded back to Julio, giving useful tips to try to fix the connection issues. These tips will be used in the upcoming week to help run the app smoothly. 

Guideway Team:

 The outer loop of the track was assembled onto the base. Most if not all of the nuts, washers and rods were used, as well as the straight and curved pieces. More of these pieces and parts will need to be bought or manufactured in the Makerspace.

The same limitation with the laser cutter applies in that it can only cut material as big as 18''x 32''. This means that the team will need to take that into consideration before taking material to be cut. The big inner loops as shown in Figure 2 will need to be redesigned so that it can be properly laser cut with the machine we use.


Figure 2: Current track in Solidworks that needs to be updated. 


Bogie Team

 The bogie has been coming along together nicely. The gears have come in and they fit well with the motor. The bogie and pod have been implemented into the Solidworks file to test for any errors or constraints the track might have. Currently, there is a gap in the track that needs to be fixed. It has also been determined that the speed of the bogie and pod around the track will be significantly slower than what was previously intended, so as to avoid any swinging that could occur with it. The bogie and pod have already began being assembled, as shown in Figure 3 and 4.

Figure 3: Bogie snap fit design. 

Figure 4: First iteration of pod with snap-fit design. 

Team As a Whole
The team has been working together to assemble most of the track and bogie. The controls are still being tested, but hopefully with the completion of the track and pod, actual testing on the guide way can begin.

Plans for next week
In the next week, the guideway team plans to finish printing out the inner track pieces and complete assembly of the overall track. With the whole COVD-19 situation going on in California and around the world, there might be some delay based on whether the Makerspace will be open or not this week to the public. If not, the team will have to work with what they have until the Makerspace is available again. The controls team will continue to improve on the Arduino code and iOS connection to the BLE. With the pod and bogie components, assembly should start to occur no later than the end of March. The Pixy cam will also continue to operate and be tested with the motor and ultrasonic sensor to ensure that all works well. The goal is to have a complete assembly of the track and bogie so that it can be tested with the controls by the end of this month.

Written by:
Justin Ghieuw
March 4th, 2020

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 iOS ap
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 sent
Post a Comment
Read more

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 YouTub
Post a Comment
Read more