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.