Colin Ilas, Jr.

For this week, we worked to create a working rapid prototype in order for us to have a good presentation for next week. Once we had all the electronics working, we worked with the 1/12th scale mechanical bogie team and the track team to combine all of our work and ultimately ended up with a working rapid prototype. Overall I am really proud of the work that we have put in this semester and am looking forward to continuing this work once we have a full track and multiple bogies working.

This week, I had all the motors and drivers soldered and began testing them. Since we were no longer using the old motors, I decided to also take one of the encoder boards from the rear and soldered it to the new motors. Once this was done, I wired everything up the Arduino and began testing it using a fade function being applied to the input. As you can see in the video below, the motors and drivers work perfectly and are ready to be used in the new bogie design. For next week, I will have both these motors in the previous pod car design so we can see if the extra torque helps with the longevity of the motors. 

This week, all of our components arrived and we began programming with what components we could. I started by soldering all the components and making sure that the motors and servos are functioning. Our new motors feature a 100:1 geartrain compared to the 76:1 gear ratio of the previous design. Through this, our pods will run a little bit slower but will have much more torque. We hope that this will help with the problem of motors dying very quickly. Next week, I plan to have all the motors and drivers working so I can begin calculations on the motor speeds, specifically during turns.

This week, we began working with the previous pod designs to try to get the Xbee communications working. We were able to put together a working pod and ran in on the track. We noticed that the pod would loop around the full track but then stay in a loop between station 3 and 4. Unfortunately purchasing a ticket did not show to be working with the pod, as no purple LED came on. Through this, we will need to take a deeper look into the communication between the Android app, server, and Firebase. Once we are able to solve this problem, we will be able to continue along with the programming of how the new pods will act depending on the ticket they receive.