Week 12 & 13

In the past 2 week, I have been doing meeting with my team to discuss and work on the control system. The wireless modules have come in and we have been trying to figure out how to implement it into our system. In order to have a controller and a receiver system, we decided to have two micro controller for our system. The controller will have one micro-controller with the joystick to process the input signal and send it to the receiver unit. The receiver unit will have a micro controller with motor, and motor driver to receive input from the controller and execute it to spin the motor. We are trying to understand how the library work and integrate the wireless modules to our system. And here is a wireless module that we use for our system.

Week 10 &11 Presentation 2

Since my group didn't present last week, today was our turn to present our progress to other sub teams. In the presentation, we have talked about our goal of Spartan Superway project as a whole. We listed out of semester end goals and also our progress on our control system. We have made a working prototype but we are still waiting for more parts to come in. After the presentation, we continue to work on our prototype and start to speed things up since there is only one month left before semester ends. We have to finalize our design and start to do documentation for our project. Besides the regular class meeting on Wednesday, our full scale team decided to meet up on Friday to discuss and cooperate on the design. I am looking forward to the meeting, so we can give each other feedback and advices.

Week 9 Presentation 2

Today was the date for presentation 2. Because we presented as the first group in presentation 1, we were scheduled to be the second group for presentation. Although we are presenting next week, we have already finished our presentation slides. Today, I sit in and listened to other group presentations. 1/12 scales sub-team presented their progress on their project. They have finalized their ideas and in the middle of the rapid prototyping as we do. I really like the 1/12 control team. They utilized the RFID tag to track the location of the bogie and send it to users device. It was a good idea which could apply to our control system.

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.