Jack's Blog for Spartan Superway

For today's meeting, we met up at the workshop and gathered in the front for the Full Scale and Half Scale group presentations. Cheuk and I were presented our second presentation to Dr. Furman, Ron and the rest of our peers. In our presentation, we discussed the progress we have made in our controls system design as well as the changes we made from our initial design. We explained how we originally wanted to purchase an motor with an encoder for position displacement but due to the high cost, we have deviated from that idea. Instead, we have decided to buy an cheaper motor and just integrate an encoder. Additionally, we talked about how we have decided to implement a wireless joystick in our design. We discussed how the current model of the podcar runs autonomously and how it would be better for us to integrate a joystick for better user control. Posted below is our presentation.

For this week's meeting, we gathered at the workshop where the Small Scale sub teams presented their Presentation #2. Each team talked about their initial designs and how they have made changes to shift towards better prototypes. A particular idea that I enjoyed in the Small Scales Controls team was that they were going to go from brush to brush-less motors.

Following up on last week's meeting, Cheuk and I discussed about the potential forms of wireless communications for the joystick. Within our research, there were 5 types in which we could follow up on. The five form of wireless communications were using WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, GSM/GPS, and RF modules such as transceivers. After researching about the pros and cons of each method, we decided to use RF modules in order for the joystick to communicate wirelessly with the microcontroller. We decided to go with using transmitter and receiver because of its low cost and simplicity. Although wireless communications such as Bluetooth and GSM/GPS would work perfectly fine, we believed for the purpose of just transmitting signal, this would be the best choice. Additionally, if we were to use Bluetooth or a different form of communication, we would have to implement software apps to use. Additionally, the bogie team was able to give us the different type of motors that we should implement. Th...

For this week, we gathered for our group meeting before getting separated into our Full Scales Team. Dr. Furman and Ron explained to us how our second presentation was coming up in two weeks. After the brief meeting, we dispersed into our sub-teams and began discussing about our future designs. Cheuk and I discussed about our progress with our initial designs and how we could improve upon it. After being successfully able to control the the direction and speed of the DC motor using a joystick, we expanded further on how to improve it. We talked about how we could get the joystick to be wireless so that it would be more user-friendly when operating the podcar for application purposes. For the rest of the class period, we researched the different forms of wireless communications and what would be the most probable and beneficial for us to implement. Posted below is the code for controlling the DC motor using a joystick: ----------------------------------------------------- //Set pin n...