Week 8: Preparation for Presentation 2

Rapid prototyping went pretty well. My team has received the joystick and the motor driver that we ordered. We read the instruction on the user manual and connected the joystick, motor, and motor driver to the Arduino. We successfully wired up the system and programmed the motor to turn clockwise and counter-clockwise. We couldn't control the speed but we are working on it. Next week is the second presentation, so we have started to read through the rubric and guideline for presentation 2. We have started a google slide presentation, so my team can edit the presentation whenever they are available. I look forward to see the progress of other sub teams and their prototype.

Week 7

Today, We were meeting at the Engineering building Room 187 for a seminar section. The seminar section was about the preparation of the semester project report. All of the Mechanical engineering students needed to attend this section. Dr. Du was giving a presentation about how to write the report. She also mentioned about the common errors that students made such as wrong formatting on figures and sentence structure. It was an useful section that gave me a guideline to prepare and write my final semester report. After the lecture, we headed to our working garage to continue working our prototype.

Week 6 Rapid Prototyping

Since the half of the sub-teams have presented their ideas last week, the other half of the sub-teams are presenting this week. My team have finished the presentation last week, so we sat in and listen for their presentation today. 1/12 scale control team presented their ideas today and their wireless control system have inspired me. They used RFID tags on the track and encoder on the motor to keep track on the location of the bogie. I think we can use similar devices such as hall effect sensors to keep track of our podcar. The parts are coming in today, and my team is meeting up tomorrow to work on prototyping. We are up to date on our gantt chart, which is good.

Week 5 Presentation #1

My team have been selected for the presentation for this week. We presented our ideas on the project where we are planning to do a rapid prototyping to simulate the full scale control system. After the presentation, Dr. Furman gave us some comments about the presentation and suggested that we can implement a manual control such as a wireless control device with a joystick and a kill switch. I think Dr. Furman have made some good recommendations for us. My team would probably take those suggestions and put them on to our prototype.