Spring 2018 - Spartan Superway Small-Scale Controls Team

In this week's session, we were able to get one PCB soldered and got it working with our assembled podcar. We re-tested the switch section and it worked successfully. However there were some problems with the track turning section that caused the podcar to re-enter the outer loop. The two rails weren't set up for a smooth re-entry of the car, but we were informed after that there is supposed to be a half-bracket that stabilizes that turn, it just hadn't been mounted yet. Something else that we've been working on includes adding status updates on the GUI so the user can see when the podcar has reached its destination.

This week, as promised, the track team finished a switch section of the track and we were able to test our controls system to a small extent. We tested that the bogie switched when presented with the correct location RFID tag and that it had enough power to navigate the track. We ran into some small hiccups because we modified our code to run on a legacy PCB. However, these bugs will be eliminated once we create our own PCBs. In addition, we took a video of our testing setup, it can be seen below. In the upcoming week, we will be ordering our PCB boards and soldering all of the necessary components onto them. This is done in order to make the controls system more modular and replaceable if a part were to break. It will also be easier to debug wiring issues this way because there will only be one large plug instead of 20 single wire connections.

Our presentation was this week and we mostly stressed how much testing and preparation we need to do to get ready for Maker Faire. As we watched the other groups present, we saw that many others were in the same mindset. In addition, we presented the progress that we have made since the last presentation and played a video demonstrating our controls system working in unison with the graphic user interface. In the upcoming weeks, we will focus on embedding our controls system into the new bogies and testing the full system. As of now, there is no switch section of the track, so the bulk of our code cannot be tested. However, we have confirmation from the track team that it will be done within the next two weeks. Until then, we will prepare for testing.

This week, we are preparing for our second presentation of the semester. We have divided up the various sections of the presentation with each person being responsible for two different sections. In this presentation, we will not be able to go as in-depth as previous presentations, so we will be slimming down our information to only include vital information and important details. For the rest of the semester, we will be working with the other small scale teams to get a track and bogie that we can run our controls system on. We will also be looking into different ways that we can test our controls system if the other sub teams do not finish in time. Currently, we plan to use a legacy bogie design to test our controls system on an existing piece of straight track.