• Lab Meetings (4 hrs):
  • met with the team to discuss work distribution with people being away from campus
• Indiviudual Work (8 hrs):
  • designed multiple propelling coils and tested and calculated their magnetic strength
  • Wrote an initial script to work with remote control and ultrasonic sensor.

Progress:

I worked with our ultrasonic sensors and remote controls this week and interfaced with them through the Arduino microcontroller. I wrote initial scripts to get readings from the ultrasonic, so we know what to program when attaching the ultrasonic to the carrier. I worked with Emanuel and we designed a couple of speed coils (solenoids). We did calculations of how much magnetic strength each solenoid would be able to output. We found with our current solenoids, we are achieving magnetic fields of about 4.5 * 10^-2 Tesla, and 4.5 teslas when accounting for the steel core, which in our case is a standard bolt.  Given this calculation, we found we were not generating as much force as expected when setting up our coils underneath our carrier. We had issues understanding how we could connect a power supply to our h-bridge so we found it difficult to feed sufficient amounts of current to our solenoid. The primary option to mitigate this is to make our solenoid larger with more turns and make those turns tighter which would lessen our length factor when it comes to magnetic strength.  When it comes to remote control we found a remote control, transceiver set which is fairly simple to integrate using a microcontroller. We will have users use this remote control to control this train. We unfortunately were not able to get to printing our track and carrier we hope to finish our CAD design this week and have the pieces printed while Emanuel and I are away at the NSBE national convention.

Next Week Deliverables:

1. Have CAD track and carrier ready to 3D print
2. Make 4 solenoids with magnetic strength output at least double of our current design.