Week 6: Rapid Prototyping

We have ordered several joystick modules and motor drivers for spare. The parts have arrived and we have started to connect the joystick modules with our Arduino Mega. The joystick modules we ordered three degrees of freedom: vertical, horizontal and a button click. The objective of this week is to get the joystick working and try to get the motor working with the joystick. Here is a picture of the joystick module we get from amazon.

Week 5: Rapid Prototyping

As we finished our first presentation last week, we have gotten an idea from Dr. Furman that we should add a manual control to the system such as a joystick control and a kill switch. We ordered some parts and started the rapid prototyping. We got an Arduino Mega from the Arduino website, a motor and a L298n motor driver from our Spartan superway garage. At first, we wired up the Arduino and tried to control rotating speed of the motor. We successfully controlled the rotating speed of the motor as we entered parameters on Arduino. Since we just ordered the joystick, we are planning to map parameters between the motor and the joystick so we can control the speed of the motor according to the movement on the joystick. Here is the setup we have so far.

 

Week 4: Presentation #1

In this week's meeting, the half scale and full scale team were to present today. Our team had the opportunity to present our new ideas that we plan on implementing onto the existing Full Scale to make it more efficient. We explained to the rest of the team and Dr. Furman, Eric and Ron about how we plan to integrate an wireless kill switch device, sonar device and an motor with an encoder. Additionally we explained possible challenges that we plan to overcome as well as how we plan to start our rapid prototyping for the future. Furthermore, we discussed on what each team member's responsibility would be as well as what we would be doing every week through our gantt chart. Presented below is our presentation.

Week 3: Preparation for Presentation 1

Today is the week 3 of our class meeting where we should be working on our Presentation 1. After we had our quick meeting of the updates from Dr. Furman and Eric, we continued to work on our presentation. 1/12th scale control group has invited the 1/12 scale control team from last semester to our class to help them and answer their questions. Since we are doing control system, we decided to sit in and listen to their conversation. It was helpful and answered some of our questions on control system. We then talked to Dr. Furman and Eric about what we should focus on. After our discussion, we got new ideas on our control system and rapid prototyping such as joystick and emergency stop button. The picture above show the existing control system in our working garage. We are looking forward to working on those prototyping and put new features on our control system.

Week 2: Presentation

For this week's meeting, we assembled at our usual workshop and presented our team's objectives and specifications to the rest of the teams. We specified how our end goal is to get the full scale pod car from one designation to another in a safe efficient manner on the 18m length track. Due to limited resources, we referenced our controls system based off the 1/12th scale model. Additionally, we exemplified how we will continue researching existing personal rapid transits around the world and try to incorporate their system controls to our own.

Week 1: Introduction

After 8/30 lecture, we have formed our group and we are in charge of the control of the Full Scale Project. On the next coming week, we will look more in to the controls of existing system on full scale track system and research on some industrial transit system for reference. We need to read and refer to reports and documents to understand the progress from last year.  Our focus will be the control, position, displacement and movement of Podcars on the track. By using applicable sensors and microcontroller, we can determine the position and displacement of the Podcars. We don't have much document about the Full Scale Controls team from last years, so we are planning to refer to other controls team and professors for assistance. Next week, we will be making a presentation about what we found, project description, specification, and end goals.