Team Status Report of April 6

Overall progress:

We were able to fix the vast majority of the issues that we ran into implementing Sergey’s solver. Furthermore, we were able to create a full scale simulation of the swingup problem both in SLP simulation and LTSpice circuit simulation. In both cases, we were able to verify that the solutions work.

Significant risks and risk management:

Risk:  While the circuit seems to work properly, we still need to properly identify what kinds of issues arise in the physically circuit

Description: We were able to predict much of the behavior of the “real world” circuit by using the components specified in the BOM. However, the actual behavior of the circuit will obviously be different

Severity: If the inaccuracies of the physical pcb are not properly accounted for, the circuit can have a variety of errors, including non-convergence and solutions with high error.

Resolution: We are currently modeling the behavior of some of these real-world effects as electrical components. For example, we have capacitors on the op amps that do not exist in the theoretical formulation, but exist in the real world analogue due to the parasitic capacitances. However, there are many more places where these issues can occur. The largest source of error compared to the circuit is the transition from resistors to linpots.

Changes to the existing design:

There are currently no significant changes to the existing design. However, depending on the root cause of the inaccuracies, we might change the design to fix it.

Changes to the project schedule:

Similarly, there are currently no significant changes to the project schedule. We aim to order the PCB as early as possible.