Week 14_05/18/19

Our demonstration day went great as expected. We had a lot of people visit our station and ask questions about the project. The visitors seemed really interested and our group gave their all to satisfy them with an answer. Even though our motor driver burnt out halfway through the whole event, we still made an effort to explain the visitors the objectives and the working of our project. Overall, it was a great semester of learning by doing.

Week 13_5/10/19

Today we have our final presentations. The track was assembled, and the controls box suspension was mostly completed. We plan to come in early for the demonstration day on Saturday (5/18/19) to finalize the assembly and run verification tests. We have also started work on the final report and so far its going great.

Week 12_5/1/19

This week was the most interesting week for me. I got to do a lot of hands on stuff.
With the permission of Dr. Furman and Ron we got the room we wanted to place our track. After that I moved all the track supports into that room. Karen and I measured out the area that would be taken up by the track and marked a boundary of the track using tape. The track is supposed to be about 18 feet in length and about 4-41/2 feet wide.

Next I single handedly cut the supports to makes sure they were all equal. All team members agreed on a height of 7 feet.

Week 11_4/24/19

This week our team focused on getting the bogie reassembled. We have one of the bogies with the new chain system halfway rebuilt. I also worked a little bit on getting the our work space organized. In addition, I worked on the code as well. 

I also helped my team mates organize the components in the bogies controls box as well.

Week 10_4/17/19

This week we finished the second power point presentation of the semester and presented it in front of the audience present there. Our team got great feedback from Dr. Furman and Ron.

In the autonomous mode, the bogie moves forward by using the output from the ultrasonic sensor. We defined the safe distance for our bogie to be a foot which is approximately 30 cm. If the distance is less than 30 cm, the power-train motor stops and the serial monitor displays "STOP BOGIE". Between 30 cm to 80 cm, the serial monitor warns the user that the bogie is getting to close to an obstacle. If the distance is greater than 30 cm, the bogie is okay to proceed. We also included the code for the hall effect sensor in our team's autonomous control mode. If the distance outputted by the ultrasonic sensor is greater than 30 cm and the hall effect sensor is triggered the bogie turns left or right based on the code.

Week 2_2/13/19

This week we had a guest speaker  from BART, Mr. Jean who gave us a talk about work done on  renewable energy and other transit systems like BART. After the immensely enriching talk, we were able to start gathering our things to figure out what needed to be done next. I was tasked with understanding the mechtronics and incorporating it with the current motors in place. I looked through many previous year's blogs and reports to understand how they came up with the current mechatronics design in place.

Week 9_4/10/19

This week, we were supposed to present but their wan't enough time to do so. We plan to present next week.
the housings were designed so the switch can fit snug into the space that is there and screws will be drilled into the housing to keep it in place on the bogie. I worked on the integration of the ultrasonic sensor with the master code.

Week 8_3/27/19

We had presentations this week, but the last half of class was used for moving the rest of the tracks from campus to Superway. Our group could not present this week.

Over the past week, I had helped Oscar with designing limit switch hosuing. Oscar and Hector 3-D printed the housing for the hall effect sensors, limit switches and the ultrasonic sensors at work, but there was a lot of flash on these pieces. I was able to help Matthew get these piece finished by the end of the day.  We also added extra stuff to our presentation for next week.

Figure: Limit switch fixture designed in SolidWorks.

Week 7_3/20/19

This week Oscar, Hector and I tested the code for the stepper motor. The code for the stepper motor was worked on and various adjustments were made to the code. To verify the new code, one of the bogies that had the stepper motor was connected to the Arduino and tested. The video of the testing has been posted below.

Week 6_3/13/19

Our group presented this week. We got things moving on the mechtronics side. I finished my code for the ultrasonic sensor and Oscar helped me integrate it with Master Code.


I was able to execute the prepared a schematic of the connections of the ultrasonic sensor with the Arduino in Fritzing.

Week 5_3/06/19

We had presentations this week but ran out of time for our team. Our team narrowed down the tasks for each member. My task was to code the ultrasonic sensor for the bogie to detect any objects that were in front of it, to warn the user about any objects the bogie was approaching by displaying messages on the serial monitor and also stop the bogie to restrict the user from proceeding further and causing a possible collision. I read through many online forums and gained more knowledge about how the ultrasonic sensor functions and how to structure my code.

This week, I was able to narrow down the logic of my code and was able to construct a flow chart on the basis of that logic. The flow chart below shows the logic of the code.

The code I wrote was as follows:

Week 4_2/27/19

This week, I was able to connect a printer with the PC we found during week 1. We used the PC to print important motor and track dimension calculation data. This week I also started working with Oscar and helping more on the mechtronics side, so that we can get things moving on the mechatronics side as well. We used the last half of class to tidy up the place and organize things. I also started preparing for the presentations that are coming up next week.

Week 3_2/20/19

This week Mathew and I measured the track length to which the track should be shortened for MakerFaire. The track will need to be shortened to about 18' long and 4' tall meaning that the bogie will be traversing less of the track than it was originally planned to.
I performed additional calculations to figure out the new design specifications which our team could achieve over the course of the semester. I also figured out the mechnics of how this would be happening and which sensors would be necessary for the bogie to achieve this task.

Week 1_2/6/19

Team Member Availability and Work Station Set-up

The first week our team made a transition from the old building and posted our schedules in the blog. Also, I found components of a desktop and Mathew and I assembled it into a workstation setup with a fully functional printer attached. We plan to install SolidWorks on this machine by next week so that its easier for us as a team to prepare parts, drawings and assemblies right there and then.