Spartan Superway ME 195a/b Senior Design Project

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 3/27 This week, we received news from the full-scale motor team that the motors that we have are uni-directional and cannot break by itself. We now are adding another motor to the bogie, which means our team has to add more components into our controls system. This is also the last week we will be trying to fix the wireless communication problem. We are ordering new transceiver modules, and if those do not work, then we will not be using wireless communication in our system. Other than that, we will be working over spring break on making the motor system work and ordering the rest of the parts we need for our system. 

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 3/20 This week, we continued to have issues with figuring out our I2C communication work. We built a circuit that should have one Arduino flip a switch and an LED on another Arduino should light up. We ran the program but it was not working at all the way it was supposed to be. Professor Furman came to try and help us figure out what the problem was, but there was no luck. This next week will be the last week to figure out the I2C communication until the cut the idea, and we will also be making the motor move. 

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 3/6 This week, we gave our first round of presentations for the semester. The team prepared well for the presentation, and it showed in class. We really worked on making the images on our slides stand out and be more engaging to the audience by coupling them with animations. The rest of the week was spent finalizing our bill of materials and figuring out how much everything would be costing so we can start ordering our parts and assembling our controls system. 

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195b Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 2/27 This week, we did not meet during our normal class period because my team was at a career fair. We did meet over the weekend to work on our first presentation. The controls team feels very confident with the work that has been done up to this point. We have finalized the controls system design, the system hardware list, our PCB design, and our full controls system wiring schematic. For our presentation, we really focused on improving our Assertion-Evidence style of slides and using animations to help communicate our thoughts. 

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. 

Alex Krause SJSU ME 195a Full Scale Controls Team Individual Blog - Week of 12/5 This was our last meeting of the semester. Throughout the course of the week, we met and talked about how to divide up all of our work for the final report. We did not do much in class because there were still groups that needed to give their Presentation #3 and then everyone dispersed once those were complete. From now until December 17th, the group will be working diligently towards fixing some minor issues with our prototype program and finalizing our final report.