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Cole’s Status Report for Mar 29

This week I helped to set up for the demo. For me personally, this means making sure the robot works with the raspberry pi and that the collimator works with the speaker to put out the largest fire possible.

I also made a CAD model for the chassis of our robot to make it easier to visualize how we are going to mount the speaker on the robot and how we are going to add the box of other components to the other side of the chassis to counterbalance the weight of the speaker.

Going forward I will start laser cutting a box to store the components and start heat shielding it to make sure the LiPo’s are safe while we conduct the fire tests.

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Steph’s Status Report for March 22nd

This week I helped construct the preliminary collimator. With the collimator, we were able to put out the candle fires successfully. The issue with using this collimator for future use however, is that it was made with paper and duct taped together. This prevented us from moving the apparatus too close to the fire due to the paper’s susceptibility to catching on fire.

Moving forward, the idea is to cut down the length of the collimator to around a foot or less give or take. It will be made out of the same material as the material used to put posters inside which is a flexible form of cardboard. This way, it is able to  maintain shape easier, prevent leak of power, and is less susceptible to fire. It will also be wrapped in steel malleable sheets which I hope to use as soon as it gets in.

Along with the collimator, I will be helping CAD parts of the chassis as well as mounting the speaker onto the robot.

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Team Status Report for Mar 22.

This week we had a working fire test!!!

Using the preliminary collimator we made out of duct tape and cardstock we were able to extinguish 3 candles at once. We were a little concerned about this test as the collimator was made of a flammable material so the test was conducted at a further distance than we originally planned. Not only that, the collimator itself was longer than we have planned for our final design. This indicates that with our final design being shorter and more fire-safe we can likely put our significantly larger fires than 3 candles at once.

This coming week we plan to start integrating the basics of out project to start preparing for our interim demo. We hope to have the demo be us extinguishing fire from the speaker mounted in some non-final form on the robot which we drive with a keyboard.