Week 18 - Spartan Superway Controls

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 we will be working on our program and GUI so that the small scale system will be interactive. It will be a great feature to show how complex the control system can get and how each pod will interact with each other.

 

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