Week 10: Acquiring materials from the shop

This week I disassembled the suspension from last year to obtain the actuator the team used. This actuator will be used for our test frame. I also found leftover material that could be used for some of the parts that need to be manufactured. Next week we have our presentation, so I will be preparing for that in the mean time.

Week 9: Spring Break Progress

I was given advice by my ME106 lab instructor to use the PID() function from Arduino to account for the self-balancing logic in our main code. After researhcing and digging into multiple forums I was finally able to develop a code that could potentially work for our application. A problem that I ran into was that since the PID() function takes the error of inclination an adjusts the actuator accordingly, which requires the system to actually be built in order to troubleshoot.

Week 8: Test Frame Arduino Code

For this week, I researched methods on how we could use a mechatronic system to simulate the half-scale track with a test frame. The test frame will be used to showcase our design at Maker Faire, since we do not plan on transporting the half-scale track to Maker Faire. I figured the best way to simulate the track is with an actuator that moves a rail within a range of -17 to 17 degrees. A switch will be used to toggle between a joystick that is user-controlled and a default mode that simply traverses the track between -17 and 17 degrees in a loop.