S2 - Final Presentation & Maker Faire

On 5/11/18, we gave our final presentation, which should be posted on the Small-scale Controls blog.

(Thursday 5/17/18) For Maker Faire, Ben tested the podcars at the event on Thursday, and because they had to remove one of the track supports, they just had to remove a station.

Friday, Ben and Coby went to Maker Faire.

Saturday, Coby and I went to Maker Faire and we had pods running on and off, all day. Throughout the day, the motors would slow down, and after some maintenance, they would run a bit longer before eventually seizing. After cycling through some back-up motors, we ended up with one podcar working by the end of the day. After getting back to the SSW warehouse that night, Coby and I grabbed all the old motors we could find.

On Sunday, Ben and I attended the event and initially ran the podcar that was ready to be used from the night before. After switching the other two motors, we had a couple cars running at a time for maybe an hour or so. Unfortunately soon after that, all the motors that we had began seizing and we ended up taking some motors off and letting people push the podcars around the track, while explaining what the project is about. It seemed as though a significant number of people were still interested in the project and we conversed with many, throughout the day, about what Spartan Superway aims to be.

S2 | Week 16 - Discovery and further testing/revision/assembly

This week (5/9/18), 2 reps from Discovery came to film us all while we were working on testing our projects and preparing for Maker Faire.

Coby was working on soldering more PCBs while Ben and I were assembling the 2 remaining podcars.

After Coby finished the PCB, we tested it on the assembled podcar we had and everything worked correctly.

Now we're just preparing for our final presentation that is on Friday (5/11/18).


P.S. when trying to read messages from the serial port after the podcar had reached its destination, we'd get a weird string, which also included the message we wanted. But I haven't found a way to translate it or filter out the extra bits that are being sent. We are most likely not pursuing this Status update feature and moving forward with everything that we already have working.

S2 | Week 15 - GUI Bug and Discovery Channel

This week (5/2/18), we found out that Discovery Channel will be coming to film the Spartan Superway project next week.

While testing, we also found a bug with our code. We observed the podcar going to the designated station when we ordered Station 12 from the GUI. However, once it stopped there, the LED would light blue again and the car would travel around the track until it reached Station 12 again.

We found out this was because the Serial port remained open after a request would be made. So basically the podcar would travel to that destination as many times as you'd press "Request Pod" on the GUI.

We simply closed the Serial port after a destination was recorded in Arduino, and opened it back up after the podcar reached its destination. This fixed our problem of Requests lingering in the Serial buffer.

S2 | Week 14 - More testing/ PCB soldered

In this weeks meeting (4/25/18), Coby was able to get our first PCB soldered and ready to go. We tried it out with our podcar and everything seemed to be in order.

We had some trouble with the podcar going from the inner loop to the outer loop because of an elevation difference between the rails. Later we found out that the Track team still has to put on a half bracket to stabilize the transition.

I've also been working on getting the Arduino to write a message to the XBee so that we could read the message in Python and print the location of the pod once it has reached its destination.

S2 | Week 13 - General meeting for Engineering Ethics

This week (4/18/18), we met in ENGR189 to go over the 3rd ME 195B paper we had to write, which involved implementation of the Engineering Code of Ethics.

After the meeting, we went to the warehouse and tested our podcar on the track. The Track team was able to deliver their turn section portion so we were able to successfully test our steering arm. There were a few problems with the PCB because we were using the old one from last year.

However, in the upcoming weeks, we will be soldering the new PCBs so we can test them out.

S2 | Week 12 - Presentation 2

This week (4/11/18), all the sub-teams presented their 2nd Presentations.

We were able to show everyone our progress and showed a video of how we could request a station, using our GUI which was loaded onto a Raspberry Pi, and have our control system work like we had been describing to them.

We watched all the other groups present and by the end, there wasn't too much time left so we decided to meet at our usual time on Friday.

S2 | Week 11 - Waiting to test our control system

(4/4/18) In today's meeting, we wanted to test our control system on the track, however the bogie was not quite done yet and the same goes for the turning section of the track. However, the new, smaller-width straight portion of the track was there for us to try out. We tried using the first prototype of the bogie, however the width was too great and the bogie would get stuck when attempting to pass the stability clamps on the track.

Ben and I took the bogie and sanded down the sides to a point where after we assembled the axle and wheels, the bogie would be able to barely fit through the stability clamps.

Meanwhile, Coby was working with the new podcar prototype to get all of our components set up and he made sure everything was fitting correctly, etc.

We are hoping to test our control system on the turning section of the track in our next session. We're also preparing for Presentation 2, which is taking place next week as well.

S2 | Week 10 - SPRING BREAK

There is no meeting on 3/28/18 because we will be on break.

During the break, were just cleaning up our Python and Arduino code and making sure everything is in order.

S2 | Week 9 - Improvements made on the Python GUI

(3/21/18) In our meeting today, Coby and Ben were setting up our GUI on the Rasberry Pi and displaying it on the TV, while trying to troubleshoot and fix scaling issues.

I continued to work on the options menu and I finally found a solution which passes the selected station to my function! From there, I compared the selection to strings labeled Station 01 - Station 14, and based on which station matches, the corresponding Station number then gets written to our instructions array.

So now, we have a functional options menu, which greatly simplified the aesthetics of our GUI, while also simplifying our Python code by about 20-25 lines.

S2 | Week 8 - 'Global Economy and Social Impacts' meeting

(3/14/18) This week's meeting took place in Room ENGR 189, where Dr. Hsu gave a presentation about how outsourcing work to countries like India and China can create a sort of global economy. Because of the time differences, there could technically be people working on whatever project 24 hours a day, where 8 hours are worked in each country. He went on to explain how this could help stimulate our own economy, as well as the other countries, while continuing to create more of a middle class in places like India and China by giving the poor jobs to help them make money so they could start affording the products that they are helping make. 

We made our way back to the SSW warehouse, agreed to continue working on personal assignments until we have a bogie and track to test our control system on, and left. 

After more research, the options menu is still not functional. I'm still having the same problem where I can't get the chosen option to pass through to my function. Either no value is passed through, or it's always the first option (Station 1) that is passed through. I'll keep researching and trying to figure out a solution. 

S2 | Week 7 - Team meetings

(3/7/18) This week's meeting was for all the sub-teams to continue working on whatever tasks they needed to complete. 

We added some more features to our GUI so now, the user can choose the station they want to travel to, or get picked up at, then select the podcar they wish to choose, and finally they can choose "Request Pod" for the request to be sent to the podcar via Xbee modules.

I have been trying to implement our options menu, however, I can't seem to get the chosen option to correctly pass through to my function so that the correct station number can be written to our instructions array.

* Our instructions array consists of 2 elements. The first corresponds to the station number to be traveled to and the second element corresponds to the podcar chosen to go to said station.

S2 | Week 6 - Presentation 1 (2nd set of teams)

(2/28/18) This week's meeting consisted of the rest of the teams presenting their first presentations, which took up most of the time. After we got updates on all the sub-teams' progress and planned next steps, we got together with our respective sub-teams and discussed what we wanted to do next.

The multi-podcar capabilities were added to the GUI and what I really wanted to do next was to take the 14 buttons that represented the different stations along the track and combine them into an options menu. This will make our GUI look more compact and less clunky.

S2 | Week 5 - Presentation #1

In this week's meeting (2/21/18), we were the 2nd group to present our 1st presentation. The first 5 groups were to get 10% extra credit so that's why we chose to go on the first day. After watching the rest of the groups' presentations, we met with our respective sub-teams to discuss what our next steps would be.

We decided to further develop our Python GUI and add options to choose a specific pod to travel to the designated station that the user chooses. (Multi-pod capabilities)

S2 | Week 4 - Valentine's Day AE Presentation

This week's meeting mainly took place in ENGR 189 again, where Dr. Furman presented on how to use the Assertion-Evidence method of presenting. After this presentation, all of the classes split up into their respective project groups and classrooms. We went back to the warehouse and the sub-groups got together to touch base.

Ben was able to make a basic GUI using Python and we decided to expand on it and further learn the language. Therefore, our GUI will now be written in Python as opposed to Processing.

S2 | Week 3 - More research on GUI

In this week's meeting, we took a group photo of the Spartan Superway Team and we watched a presentation about ATN's/PRT's in Sweden.

With the rest of the time we had, we got together and kept going through the Processing code to try and make more sense of it. We then began discussing the possibility of exploring and using another language to build our UI with. We agreed to take a look at Python as well in the upcoming weeks to determine whether it was a viable alternative for us to use.

S2 | Week 2 - Lightning Talk Presentations

In this week's session, all of the groups had prepared their own respective Lightning Talk presentations. Each group proceeded to present their progress thus far and the direction they were planning on taking their project.

After presentations ended, we met with our respective sub-groups and discussed what should be done next. We also were able to finalize our Bill of Materials.


Coby, Ben, and I also took the solar panel sheet, which is next to the old 1/12 scale track, outside in order to test it under the sun. We connected the battery charger we had to it to confirm its functionality for Maker Fair when were outside, possibly away from any outlets.

We're currently all researching and looking into Processing so that we can make a GUI that can interact with the podcars, our Arduino, and our Xbee units. The Summer 2016 Korean team had made a UI using Processing so we're diving in and trying to understand how their code works as well.

Semester 2 | Week 1 - First meeting of the semester

Today marks the first day of our last semester working Spartan Superway. First, all the senior project classes met at ENGR 189 to recap on what is expected of all seniors in our presentations and final documentations. Afterwards, we all went to the Spartan Superway Warehouse and had our general meeting to see where things are with the project as a whole.

 We were then informed that we have to prepare a Lightning Talk presentation for next Wednesday to catch the rest of the teams up on our progress thus far.