Spring 2018 - Spartan Superway Small-Scale Controls Team

This week we gave our first presentation, which can be found below: Overall, we learned a couple of things that we need to prepare for the next presentation. We need to be more detailed with our introduction and talk more about the project as a whole. We also need to improve our functional specifications to expand on the requirements of the system. Lastly, we will need to expand on our Gantt chart and go further into our tasks for each week. With these changes, we can expect to do a much better job for the next one.

This week, we began taking a look into the coding that was used on the previous bogie. Our main focus is to understand every section of the code, but with over 2000 lines of code it is proving to be difficult. We feel that it may be best if we break down the code and reuse only the parts that we believe we will need for the new Futran system. Because we are not using the Hall Effect sensors anymore and instead implement RFID tags to signal when to turn, we began by looking into the RFID.h library and the MFRC522 guides. Overall, we were able to get the cards to be recognized in the serial monitor and were able to rewrite them as well. After achieving this, we created a quick script that would turn the LED on the Arduino on if the correct RFID tag was read, and light up another LED if it did not have the right data. We were successfully able to do so and with this information we will be able to program our servo for switching between different tracks.  The next step is to und...

This week, we talked to the Summer 2017 Controls team about any problems they had during their time on the project. It was a great resource and they were able to answer all of the questions we had. From this meeting we were able to set a few goals, one of which being that we were going to navigate the bogie using only two forms of positioning. This will greatly reduce the complexity of the controls code as well as give the bogie a simplified look. A flow chart of the new positioning system can be seen below. For the upcoming week, we will be researching the XBee wireless communication board to get a better understanding of how it will communicate with the mobile app. We will also begin a wiring diagram for some components on the new bogie. Lastly, we will be working with the RFID code to get a better understanding of how we could utilize it to replace the Hall effect sensors.

For our second week with the Spartan Superway, we gave a lightning presentation about our specific project. We introduced what the project was, it's certain specifications, and what our end goals were. This presentation also allowed us to practice the assertion-evidence method of presentations. For this week, we plan to begin learning how the previous code for the pods work, as well as understand the different components that allow it to work. We will then begin planning how the electronics will be built for the new Futran track.

For our first week, we began by touring the new facility. We were then assigned to the 1/12th scale controls team, which is comprised of Ben Trump, Andi Khosravi, and Colin Ilas, Jr. For the rest of this week's meeting we discussed our role within the SPARTAN Superway project and got acquainted with each other. Next week, we will be discussing the research that we have done on the previous team's documentation as well as our plans moving forward with the project. We will also give a lightning talk with our project's description, specifications, and end goals.