Week 10: Presentation 2

This week we gave a presentation on our current progress. This month we will be finalizing our design and analysis for the suspension. A link to our second presentation is below:

Week 9: Preparing for Presentation 2

This week we listened to the 1/12th scale teams presentations and were updated on their progress. We will begin to prepare our presentation this coming week.

We have decided to move forward using the linkage design and adding an actuator to control the movements of the linkage. We will also include a past project's solution for vibration and dampening in our project. Here is a CAD drawing of our design without the actuator:

Week 8: Discussing with AJ and the the Summer half-scale team

This week, we considered looking towards an active solution for our passive design to fix the swinging motion that occurred in the rapid prototype as the pod car would experience acceleration. We brought up that a complete revision might be necessary, however after talking to AJ and the  Summer half-scale team, we found that we may be able to use an actuator to lock the linkage in place while accelerating. The actuator can then be used to drive the natural motion of the linkage in an active way and controlled way with an accelerometer  and gyroscope.

Week 7: Report Guidelines and Prototype

Dr. Du gave a 1 hour lecture about the final report guidelines. After, we headed back to Spartan Superway and discussed how to handle the swinging issue in our prototype design.

Over the weekend, Colin, Salvador, and I met at Salvador's house and used his workstation to rapid prototype our design. We used a drill press, popsicle sticks, and fasteners to simulate a linkage similar to our design. Below is a picture of our rapid prototype, which keeps the pod car leveled just like we assumed.

We will meet to further investigate the issues regarding the swinging motion found when using our design.