Spring 2018 - Spartan Superway Small-Scale Controls Team

In this week's meeting (10/25/17), we spent the entire meeting watching the Full and Half scale's second presentations. In the end of the meeting we had about 15-25 minutes to meet with our subgroups. Our controls subgroup met on Monday and we researched and agreed on what parts we need/want for our project so that we may add it to out Bill of Materials. Therefore, in this brief time we had, we all came to an agreement for Coby to order the parts and they were ordered the same day, after class. Once we get the parts in, we can begin our Rapid Prototyping, which consists of a breadboard mock-up of all of our components so that we can demonstrate the functionality of our code.

In this week’s meeting, all the sub-groups of the Small-scale team were able to communicate their progress and future plans to the rest of the Spartan Superway team via Presentation 2. We were the first to present and thereafter we sat back and enjoyed being briefed on the rest of the teams’ progress. Our Presentation 2 is provided below, with more detail about each slide within each 'Speaker Notes' section, respectively. Before we began presenting, Dr. Furman informed us that there is a group in the ME 106 class whose project involves GPS work and that a few representatives of Swift Navigation will be coming to discuss the specifics of their technology with them (The Piksi Multi, found here ).  We, the controls team, were told that we could sit in on the meeting if we chose to do so because the idea of GPS for position sensing has been thrown around for Small-scale, as well as for Full-scale. The meeting was geared more towards the 106 team and questions they had on the P

For this week, we began looking further into the Xbee communication and understanding how the server contacts the bogie. We were able to decode the 8-digit packet that is sent to the Xbee module, but are still figuring out why the packet is not being sent to the Arduino. AJ suggested that we look into the different nodes that the packet has to go through in order to receive it (app > server > xbee > arduino), so we will try to take the code apart and see where the problem is happening.  With this information, we can start preparing our second presentation and our initial designs for the controls.

This week the team has been focused on getting the Xbee module to communicate to an Arduino. Because we have the RFID figured out, understanding the Xbee is the last thing that needs to be accomplished in order to write a fully functional navigation code. To do this, we have contacted the previous team in an attempt to solve the problems we are having. They gave us some tips to get us started on the Xbee troubleshooting and we will be scheduling a meeting in the near future if we are unable to get the module to work. In addition, we are working to get narrow down the components that we would like to use as well as learning how to use them effectively.