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.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 28 - Bugs and Discovery Channel

In this week's session, we continued testing and refinement of our code. We were also told that the Discovery Channel is coming in next week (5/9/18) to film the Spartan Superway project while we are all testing and preparing for Maker Faire. When sending directions via the GUI, we came across a previously unnoticed bug. After requesting the pod to go to station 12, we noticed that the notification LED would turn blue (as expected) but once the pod reached the station, it would stop, then the LED would light blue again and the pod would go around the track and stop again at station 12. We realized that the problem was because the Serial port remained open after we requested a podcar. Because of this, the request would go through as many times as we pressed the "Request Pod" button on the GUI. To fix this, we simply closed the serial port after a request had been taken in by the Arduino, and opened the port back up after the podcar reached its requested destination. Th...
Read more

Week 8 - Presentation 2 and Swift Nav. Meeting

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...
Read more

Week 4 - Spartan Superway Controls

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...
Read more