Spartan Superway ME 195a/b Senior Design Project

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195a Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 11/14 This week we progressed on making our sensors and motors work. In terms of motors, Justin received his small brushless dc motor to practice on and was able to make it work and control the speed of the motor with a potentiometer. In terms of sensors, Alan and I were able to make our hall effect sensor work, an ultrasonic sensor work, and our rotary encoder to work. We tried to make the hall effect sensor talk with the rotary encoder but we couldn't make it work. Over the weekend and this following week, the team is going to meet to work on the program and delegate some tasks for thanksgiving break so that we are prepared for our last presentation.  

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195a Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 11/7 This week was difficult. Professor Furman announced to us that as of right now we have until December 31st to move out of our warehouse. We are not 100% that we are going to evicted, but we need to start planning for the worst. Other than that, the controls team met over the weekend and we were able to write programs to start making the hall effect sensors, rotary encoder, and a small brushless DC motor work. We will continue to work on these programs this week and hopefully combine them into one program that can demonstrate the controls team plan for the full-scale prototype. 

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195a Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 10/31 This was the week where we started moving away from the conceptual and design phase and moved towards building our rapid prototype of the controls system. We were able to connect a Hall Effect sensor provided by Dr. Furman to a breadboard to start figuring out how the sensor physically responds to magnetic fields. We also met with our coach Danny to talk about our progress with the controls system. He believes we are on the right path, but he is expecting us to do a lot more than what we are planning for, which is making the group nervous. We will be able to make the bogie move down the track safely, but there are many other features that we will like to integrate into the system down the road. In terms of the rapid prototype, we are ordering a rotary encoder to start testing with next week and hopefully by the end of next, we will have the rotary encoder and Hall Effect sensors working together to