Spring 2018 - Spartan Superway Small-Scale Controls Team

Our final presentation took place on Friday, 5/11/18, and is included below: The entire Maker Faire event took place from Thursday to Sunday, 5/17 - 5/20. Thursday morning was for setting up and testing. Ben was able to attend and make sure everything was running smoothly. One of the track supports had to be removed so we also removed a station. Other than that, everything was going smoothly. On Friday, Ben and Coby went to Maker Faire and for the entire duration of the day, they were able to have at least one podcar running at a time, while the others would be taken off intermittently for small tweaks. After the event, there was free food and beer available for all the Makers. Coby and Andi attended Maker Faire on Saturday, and throughout the day, there were at least one or two podcars running at one time. We eventually were able to have all three running relatively successfully. One ultrasonic sensor had to be swapped out because the pod kept stopping randomly and as the day ...

This week was when 2 representatives from The Discovery Channel came to film Spartan Superway. While they went around asking questions about what we were all working on, we were soldering the 2nd PCB and assembling what we could of podcars 2 and 3. We then tested our code for requesting podcar 2, as well as our new PCB. Everything worked smoothly and the half bracket was then mounted on to the uneven section of the track by the Track team. We have one more PCB to solder, and we should be good to go for Maker Faire. We're just waiting on the Bogie team to deliver 2 more bogies, and in the meantime we'll just be focusing on our final presentation which is on May 11th (Friday).

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...