Week 2 - Lightning Talk

This week consisted of a lot of research into the work of previous groups that were responsible for the 1/12 scale controls. This was the primary goal because we had to put together a short Powerpoint presentation for our Lightning Talk, which consisted of:

1) Title Slide

2) Project Description

3) Project Specifications

4) Project End Goals

5) Ending Slide

I was in charge of our end goals for the project so I basically went through previous reports to see what groups weren't able to complete, either because the said task wasn't a priority or because they just couldn't get it to work.

End goals as of 9/6/17

Fixes to be made by us:

1.    Hall effect sensor not reading left (outer track) rail magnet.

·       Install new, adjustable, bracket design (several 3D printed in the work area)

2.    Improvement on switching mechanism when leaving a checkpoint.

•    Occasionally the right steering arm will not go down low enough, so the bogie gets stuck or the left arm does not go high enough and the bogie falls. (This happens due to the servo getting stuck on a wire or the gear on the servo breaking.)

3.    Re-evaluate whether our current DC motor can handle the load of the bogie.

a.    Occasionally if it’s running continuously (10-15 min), bogie will randomly stop or significantly slow down. Maybe due to particles getting inside gear assembly but more likely to be load.

4.    Research on implementing best shortest path algorithm

5.    Make libraries for sensors and bogie components to reduce 2000+ lines of code.

6.    Fix merging collision problem

7.    Apply everything we have so far to the new Futran track.

Other than that, our goals were to read up on the existing code to try and understand as much of it as we can, as well as to research different forms of position tracking, for the bogie.