Posted on

Myles’s Status Report for 4/27

Personal Accomplishments:

  • Lab Meetings (4 hrs ):
    • Watched final team presentations.
    • Provided team feedback
  • Indiviudual Work (8 hrs):
    • Met with team to integrate subsystems for final demo

Progress:

This week I worked on integrating our subsystems with the work I have been doing with the Bluetooth modules. We can programmatically send signals from the hall effect on the carrier to the track to ignite the coil to propel our carrier. The goal for the next week is to integrate this with our track and carrier which we are going to print. I believe that we are going to have stops along our track with alternating polarity. Based on the polarity the hall effect reads will determine which coil will get the signal to propel the carrier. We are on track for the demo on Friday and just need to finish up the details.

Next Week Deliverable:

Finish up final demo logistics

Posted on

Myles’s Status Report for 4/20

Personal Accomplishments:

  • Lab Meetings (4 hrs ):
    • Fixed and integrated Bluetooth communication between the track and carrier microcontroller with hall effect sensor
  • Indiviudual Work (6 hrs):
    • Met with TA and worked individually debugging Bluetooth communication
  • Team Meetings
    • finalized final presentation poster and plans for the final demo video
    • coordinated with the team for CAD decisions.

Progress:

This week I worked on debugging the Bluetooth communication between our carrier and track microcontrollers. I had issues reading the bytes I was receiving from the microcontroller that was processing the readings for the hall effect sensors. When i would do to read the bytes being sent I would receive decimal values that exceed the expected values for ASCII. When i would try to convert these bytes to a string the serial monitor would give me bogus output. I checked my circuit setup multiple times and ensured I had paired my HC05 modules correctly and found that the issue was resolved when I replaced the receiving HC05 with a spare. Mostly a component within the HC05 stopped working.

When it came specifically to debugging Bluetooth communication, the Arduino blogs were most helpful, where people would document issues that seemed very similar to mine. Generally reading technology blogs when it came to finding tutorials was also very helpful as well. I generally found the blogs to be more helpful than the videos I came across because the steps were much more heavily documented and often times steps were skipped when it came to creating the video. While I tried implementing the solutions found on the Arduino blogs what really helped me, was going through systematically and replacing components in the circuit. The tutorials only on the blog sites were helpful for high-level understanding

Next Week Deliverable:

Add additional functionality with Bluetooth to enable the carrier to propel based on signals alone.

Posted on

Personal Accomplishments:

  • Lab Meetings (4 hrs ):
    •  Interim demo
    •  Worked with teammates to discuss work distribution for the Final Demo
  • Indiviudual Work (8 hrs):
    • Created a simple circuit to demonstrate the h-bridge component during the interim demo
    • Completed Bluetooth communication between 2 Arduino Unos

Progress:

For the interim demo, I set up a circuit with our bridge and a mini-propeller to show that we can programmatically control which way the current will flow through or coil. Additionally this week I worked on the Bluetooth communication between 2 Arduino uno modules. Currently, I have a circuit that sends messages from a sender module to a receiver, which lights up an LED on signal reception. Eventually, once we figure out at which point we want to send the signal to power our coils we will have our microcontroller module communicate this way. The main work in the coming weeks is making sure we are sending the signals fast enough, which should not be a problem considering Arduinos are reasonably responsive. Another concern is making sure we are sending the signal for a long enough time to give the coil enough time to pick up the current needed to propel our carrier forward. This will be figured out with trial and error.

Next Week Deliverable:

Incorporate user input with Bluetooth signally to allow remote control to power coil

Posted on

Myles’s Status Report for 3/30

Personal Accomplishments:

  • Lab Meetings (4 hrs ):
    • Met with Professor and TA to discuss expectations for interim demo
    • Discussed with teammates delegation of work with interim demo
  • Indiviudual Work (8 hrs):
    • Created a working demo for h-bridge circuitry
    • Did a run thru of the interim demo with teammates

Progress:

This week my main accomplishment was setting up a demo for the h-bridge component. The goal of my demonstration is to show that we can programmatically control the polarity of the current going through our coils using a microcontroller. The way I will demonstrate by alternating the spinning direction of a miniature propeller that I have. The alternate spinning is meant to show the different directions we can make the current go, with the help of the h-bridge. Going into next week I hope to make progress with our Bluetooth components to enable communication between our subsystems. Mainly Bluetooth communication will allow the carrier to send its magnetometer signals to the track to activate the coils and allow current to pass through the coils. I will be passing off the work of the coil design and time aspect of the activation of the speed coils to Emmanuel and will about the programming aspects when it comes to the microcontroller.

Next Week Deliverables:

  1. Simple Bluetooth demonstration communication between the Arduino Nano and Arduino UNO
Posted on

Myles’s Status Report for 3/26

Personal Accomplishments:

  • Lab Meetings (2 hrs, traveled to NSBE National Conference ):
    • Met with class to discuss ethical considerations of our project
  • Indiviudual Work (8 hrs):
    • Reworked the design of propelling coils to generate more magnetic strength
    • Worked on ethics assignment, to prepare for discussion on ethics day

Progress:

This week the main issue I worked on with Emanuel was making our solenoids stronger and generating more force to push our carrier forward. As I mentioned last week I was initially confused about our calculations as we were generating a lot of magnetic field strength but our results were not reflective of this. What I hadn’t realized was that I was using the wrong equation when it came to doing calculations in our case. We should have been using the short solenoid estimate version of the equation found here. With this equation, we were able to realize that our initial calculations referred to the magnetic field with the center of the solenoid where the steel core was not outside or near the solenoid. In reality, there should have been a factor of the equation accounting for how far the carrier was from the solenoid itself. This same equation had a radius factor, so making our solenoid wider, would make the solenoid more effective. We are also considering lessening our levitation required to make the z factor in the equation less in order to give us even more force. In our case, we find that we had too much levitation as opposed to too little. Going into next week, I would like to attach our improved coils to our printed track and see what design changes need to be made before our demo.

Next Week Deliverables:

  1.  Attach coils to printed track
  2. Create more wider coils
Posted on

Myles’s Status Report for 3/16

Personal Accomplishments:

  • 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.

NOTE – I realized I made an error in not accounting for the fact that the magnetic field strength of the solenoid drops off drastically with a factor of R^3. We are not getting as much force as expected because the coils are too far from the carrier. It would help however to have our coils take up a wide radius and have more turns as well.

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.
Posted on

Myles’s Status Report for 3/9

Personal Accomplishments:

  • Lab Meetings (4 hrs):
    • met with the Professor and TA to discuss the design review presentation
  • Indiviudual Work (8 hrs):
    • wrote the testing, validation section, architecture of operations, and bill of materials
    • Wrote initial Arduino script and constructed basic circuit with PWM

Progress:

Behind Schedule – This week I implemented the Arduino script to send PWM inputs to the H-Bridge. The script periodically would switch the direction of the current. We set up a circuit with a miniature propeller as the motor connected to the H-Bridge. With the periodic propeller switch in the script the direction the propeller spins would switch. We are behind schedule in that we still need to design a new CAD track and carrier that addresses our stability issues. Next week, I plan to figure out and research how the ultrasonic and Hall Effect output information and how to read it properly.

Next Week Deliverables:

  1. redesign track and carrier with connection grooves for increased stability
  2. Write the initial script for the hall effect and ultrasonic sensors. The main goal is to figure out how the output of the sensor and how to interface with them with the Arduino.
Posted on

Myles’s Status Report for 2/24

Personal Accomplishments:

  • Lab Meetings (4 hrs):
    • Attended section’s Design review presentations and gave constructive feedback
  • Team Meetings (6 hrs):
    • Wrote the design review slides and finalized details for MVP
  • Research (2 hrs):
    • Looked into PWM through Arduino and found scripts to output PWM to the input pins of the h-bridge
    • Worked on a simple LED circuit to showcase PWM and the ability to raise and lower the duty cycle for the LED

Progress:

Behind Schedule – We need to change our CAD design for the carrier and track and have not made as much progress regarding propulsion. This week we worked with a cardboard prototype to see the feasibility of levitation and achieved a levitation of over an inch.  We will be doing the CAD development of the track and carrier in parallel with the H-Bridge circuit.

Next Week Deliverables:

  1. redesign track and carrier with connection grooves for increased stability
  2. Implement PWM for the input pins on the H-Bridge to create the propulsion force
Posted on

Myles’s Status Report for 2/17

 

Personal Accomplishments:

  • Lab Meetings (4 hrs):
    • Discussed with TA and Professor the details of the proposal and cleared up design choices for MVP
  • Team Meetings (4 hrs):
    • Worked on Design Review Slides and updating gant chart with updated tasks because of tweaked design for MVP
    • Decided to move away from RFID sensors and digital potentiometer.
    • Finished CAD prototype for carrier
  • Research (4 hrs):
    • Researched H-Bridges, magnetometers, and ultrasonic sensors as alternatives for our proposal design.

Progress:

Behind Schedule – The schedule will be updated to reflect setbacks. We should have progressed with the coil circuitry this week but we needed to refine our design to meet our use case requirements. We initially were not sure about how we were going to implement obstacle detection and had mentioned LIDAR sensors in our presentation we decided to go with an ultrasonic sensor to make things simpler. We also decided not to use an RFID configuration to gauge user input as this was clunky and generally not what RFIDs are used for.

Next Week Deliverables:

    1.  Finish track CAD prototype
    2. Order magnets, sensors, 3D filament
    3. Start coil circuit try and Arduino voltage input
Posted on

Myles status report 2/10

Personal Accomplishments:

  • Presentation (4 hrs):
    • On Sunday teammates and I finalized our slides for our presentation on Monday.
  • Lab Meetings (4 hrs):
    • I gave our team’s presentation on the proposal and also took part in active engagement in listening and giving feedback to other teams’ proposals.
  • Team Meetings (4 hrs):
    • Discussed track design and how we should scale it based on model train tracks
    • Research Maglev Model Alternatives

Progress:

On-time with schedule

Next Week Deliverables:

  1. Start the 3D printing design for the carrier and track
  2. Order Prototype 1 materials
    1. 3D printing material
    2. Digipot, magnets