Category: Shuailin Pan’s Status Reports

This week, I mainly focused on modeling, cutting and assembling the final outer chassis of the entire system. I also helped with standardizing soldering practice for the hall effect sensor with Sizhe to ensure minimal variance for each piece so that we can avoid connection issues and minimize detection difference.

Schedule and risk wise, due to the consumption of the components, we are only on track for a working 6 by 6 board for the presentation next week. However, Sizhe designed a new improved PCB that is optimized for soldering ease and pathing which we will use for the final product.

Next week after the presentation, I will help with soldering the new PCB boards, further testing, and internal wire management for the final demo product.

This week, I mainly finish grunt works and setup circuit and prep for smooth gantry integration. I laser cut go pieces in bulk and assembled them together with Sizhe. I also setup a transparent full size gomoku board for clearer movement and integration testing. I also helped with hall effect sensor detection and multiplexer circuit.

Design wise, I scrapped the idea of using compression spring in the go piece magazine, since after mass producing the go pieces, I found out that inserting over 20 pieces into the spring loaded magazine chamber requires too much force. Meaning, for integration, the feeding system would be upright using gravity instead of horizontal using compression spring.  Feeding movement involving stepper motor is unchanged. Risk wise, this is a simple change and mainly only impacted appearance and not functionality.

Schedule wise, I am still behind due to not being able to integrate with gantry. However, I finished all possible prep work, testing circuity and code to help expediting once we can integrate with gantry next week.

 

This week I mainly finish constructing and putting together the actual go pieces using laser cutting and successfully test the feeding system using the stepper motor with flags, laser cut housing and the compression spring. I also help with testing the interference of hall effect sensor detection and the locking system. After testing, we conclude that given current designed magnet and board thickness, there should be no issues.

Design wise, there are no major changes in the feeding system. However, I may need to laser cut new housing for the feeding magazine when trying to integrate with the gantry system.

Plan wise, I am behind on the deciding the actual placement of the feeding system as well as the positioning of the feeding area since I don’t have access to the gantry system.

Next week, since our teammate is coming back, I will mainly focusing on integration with other modules and implement any changes needed for the feeding system.

For the past weeks, aside from finishing the design report, I completed the following functions/tests:

• Working Electromagnet that is able to attract magnet pieces
• Test and ensure the magnet piece attraction and locking via magnets works across plywood up to 9mm thick
• Test for locking via non magnetic ferromagnetic sheet metal washer (backup) and concludes that it is not as ideal as using permanent magnet for locking
• Test and ensure that stepper motor has enough force to separate magnet go pieces with 6mm of plywood in between

Schedule wise, due to the closure of Ideate material lending office during spring break, I was not able to procure more plywood to laser cut the chassis for the feeding magazine and more go pieces. Thus, I was not able to finish the go feeding system as planned for integration.

For next week, after catching up with the unfinished laser cutting jobs, I will assemble and test go feeding chassis integrated with stepper motor, and help with interference testing between electromagnet, HE sensor and locking system. I would also likely begin writing Gomoku software logic in case the team cannot meet up for integration.

This week, I mainly help with testing and debugging the magnetic levitation device. We successfully make levitation work, ensure the feasibility of movement during maglev, test the accuracy requirement for the maglev device, test the interference distance, and deduce the rough general grid size requirement. (More details in Team status report) We also ensure the feasibility of using custom magnets for the maglev device:

For the Go feeding system that I’m responsible for, I designed a brief physical housing for the Go piece magazine and modeled it in Solidworks.

The current risk is that our rough interference distance estimate (about 130 mm) is relatively big compared to the gantry size (500mm x 500mm), which means the grid size (eg. 5×5 vs 6×6) may not be as big as we’d like. For possible mitigations, we need to test more robust locking mechanism, or switch to board games with smaller grid size (eg. Gomoku vs Tik-Tack-Toe)

Next week, we are going to test for electronic magnet locking mechanism and its interference with maglev design and test the gantry accuracy once it arrives. For piece feeding, I will use the laser cutter to cut out the design and see if the go piece mag works.

This week, I mainly discusses the quantitative metrics that we need for the design report and help with soldering and debugging the DIY magnetic kit with Chen.  I also continue on doing research about stepper motor torque calculation and magnetic force calculation to prepare for the design metrics.

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/tools/stepper-motor-calculator/

https://www.kjmagnetics.com/calculator.asp

Risk management wise, due to the failure to debug the center piece of our project (maglev device), the risk is skyrocketing, since many of the tests such as interference and movement are dependent on the maglev device. To get back on schedule, we have decided to leave the finicky maglev device alone and switch to commercial product for more reliability. Luckily, for the gantry system, we decide to buy half-built system instead of building from scratch, which would leave some extra time in our original schedule.

Next week, aside from the design presentations, I will mainly focus on testing the new commercial maglev device with our teammates, and also start building and testing the integrated feeding system using device that match the specs from this week’s calculation.

 

Aside from finishing up detailed schedule and attending proposal presentations this week, I mainly did research on the Arduino software and circuit design for controlling solenoid and stepper motor. The video that I was mainly studying are the following two:

I am currently on schedule for researching to design and feasibility of the go piece feeding system. However, testing for maglev feasibility has been delayed due to delivery issues and we plan to move the maglev testing to next week.

For next week, I plan to mainly perform tests and gather data required for the design of the Go piece delivery system:

• Test for the forces required to push to separate magnets directly sticking together horizontally.
• Test for the forces required to push to separate mock Go pieces (magnets surrounded by non magnetic materials) sticking together horizontally.
• Create a physical prototype barrier as the Go piece (magnet) holder to test for feasibility of pushing to separate and displace the Go pieces.
• After finding out the average forces required to separate pieces sticking together, test for the feasibility of using a solenoid or stepper motor to separate the magnets.
• Figure out the go piece holder’s structure and motor placement after deciding the kind of motor used for piece feeding.