SJSU ME 195a Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 10/10

Alex Krause
SJSU ME 195a Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 10/10

Reality set in this week. Some of the goals the controls team were trying to meet would have been great to meet, but were mostly out of reach and would have required too much work. Considering past work and presentations at Maker Faire, we knew our main goal for the year was to make the bogie travel through the entirety of the track. With this goal in mind, we talked to the full-scale track team and we learned that the track shape was not what we thought it was going to be. At first, we thought the track was going to have a straight section and then approach a Y-intersection and the bogie would have to turn either left or right. The actual track just has one long stretch of track and has a left turn on it. For Maker Faire, the controls team's goal is to have two paths the bogie can take. It can either go the full straight distance of the track, reverse, turn left, and then return to its starting position, or it can turn left, reverse, go straight, and then return to its original position.
The team also talked to the full-scale bogie team to talk about how we are going to control the steering since we have a master and a slave bogie system design. We are going to be sticking with linear actuators, but how they are going to be implemented is still up for consideration. Justin has been doing a fantastic job of researching how brushless dc motors work so that when the time comes to work with them, we will know how to program them. I have been researching hall effect sensors and RFID tags to try and see which one is better to determine where the bogie is at all times on the track. By the end of this next week, I will have a decision on which one to use and a better idea of how the program will determine where the bogie is on the track during its movement.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 5/1

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 5/1 This past week, our team was finally able to make a lot of working components come together into a working system. With the wireless communication working, we were able to move onto figuring out how to controls the motors remotely. I started working with a simple 12-bit DAC so that the Arduino could send a solid analog signal into the throttle control of the motor controller. I was able to make it output a specific voltage, and then i was able to combine it with the wireless transceiver to control the speed of the bogie wirelessly by turning a potentiometer. With that working, all of the components of our controls system were working, so this last week will be focused on putting stuff together in an organized manner, cleaning wiring up, and working on the main program for the system.  
Read more

SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 4/17

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 4/17 This past week, the team continued to work on making the individual electrical components work before we combine them all together into our system. Justin was able to make the motor work completely forwards and backwards. Alan and I have been working on making the linear actuator work with an H-Bridge and relay but we are having trouble making the circuit work. Danny is coming in this week and we will hopefully be able to ask him what is wrong and how to fix it. Lastly, we divided the parts of our final report so we can start on that earlier rather than later.
Read more

SJSU ME 195a Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 8/29 & 9/5

This individual post is covering the first two weeks of progress for this project. I had issues uploading blogs which is why I was unable to post last weeks, individual blog. 8/29/2018: Today's class was focused on introducing the group to the project and dividing everyone into their designated groups. First, we were given a background about the status of the project as a whole, and then we were given our assigned teams. I was assigned to the full-scale bogie team. The full-scale bogie team and full-scale guideway teams grouped together and divided into 5 sub-teams. 1. Guideway Team 2. Controls Team 3. Drivetrain 4. Bogie 5. Wayside Power I elected to be a part of the controls team. We then shared contact information with the entire team, as well as sub-teams, and discussed what needed to happen before we met the next week. 9/5/2018: In class today, each team or sub-team gave a quick 5 minutes presentation about their project scope and basic objectives for the school
Read more