Spartan Superway ME 195a/b Senior Design Project

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 2/20 This week, the full-scale controls team mainly focused on trying to make two Arduino's talk to each other using I2C communication. We are still having a couple of problems with it, but we are close to figuring it out, and we will have a working prototype of a joystick on one Arduino steering a servo motor on another Arduino for our first presentation of the semester. The full-scale motor team is also getting a new motor controller which is much more usable and easier to work with, but it will take a while for it to come in. We still cannot work on controlling the motor, but we will be researching how to do it so we will be ready when the new controller comes in. 

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 2/13 This week, the full-scale controls team wanted to create an outline for what exactly is going to be used for the full-scale model, what we need to work on immediately, and what will need to be purchased. The list of materials is still being finalized, but we will have it complete by this weekend. We also learned that the motor that the motor team ordered has hall effect sensors inside, so we will be using those to track the position of the bogie on the track instead of a rotary encoder. We will still be using hall effect sensors with magnets on the actual track so that we can have a guide on when to complete other tasks during the bogies trip. The immediate tasks are to be able to have two Arduino's talk to each other and make the motor run in a controlled manner.