Spring 2018 - Spartan Superway Small-Scale Controls Team

This week, we got a look into the overall progress of the SPARTAN Superway. We sat down and watched all of the full-scale team presentations, which gave us a much needed update on what to expect from full scale by Maker Faire. We have completed our GUI at this point, we just need to attach all of the different buttons to functions. One of the main functions that still needs to be added is multi-pod capability. We have a layout and pseudocode for how the program should work, but it has yet to be coded. In the next week, we will focus on adding multi-pod capability to our controls system. This is so we can pick the exact pod and time that we want to call it. We plan on being able to demonstrate this capability in next week's Superway meeting.

This week, we presented our first presentation of the semester. In this presentation, we went over the current progress of the controls team and what we plan to do for the rest of the semester. We started by detailing our new GUI interface created through Python. The user will be able to set their current position and destination in the GUI, which will then be sent to the podcars via the Xbee modules. We also went over our current fabrication progress. The miniature prototype we finished last semester allowed us to create a working control system without the need to wait for a track or bogie. Near the end of the semester, we were able to take apart an older podcar and put the new components in it, allowing us to test everything to make sure the pods run the way we want them to. Once we have finished testing, we will purchase the rest of the components to complete all the podcars. We hope to have a working track by then to test multiple pods running at once. Overall, this semester

This week, we listened to a lecture from an architect about possible different designs that we could use for supporting the full-scale superway. The talk was very informative, but ultimately didn't contain any information that we would be able to use. Moving forward with the week, we will focus on making more features possible with our GUI by changing the Arduino code to allow more inputs. By doing this, we will be able to allow the end user to have many different options when it comes to picking a pod, destination, speed, and path. We will also be making changes to the GUI to make it look more professional such as adding pictures and text packages.

This week, we presented our lightning talk as well as watched the other group's talks. This gave us much needed insight as to the overall progress and future of our projects. We then solidified our budget and we are now able to begin ordering parts. However, we will most likely wait a couple of weeks so that we are sure exactly what we need to order. In the coming weeks, we will be finalizing our parts list and then ordering the parts. At the same time, we will be learning processing language and testing the viability of other languages. We will begin construction our controls systems in the next few weeks.