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.