Week 3: Frame design

Dr. Furman suggested that we should design a frame to showcase our suspension instead of transporting the entire half-scale track to Maker Fair. We will be designing the frame within the next few days. I have also started the code for the Arduino program, in which the gyroscope can be read from the Serial Monitor.

Week 2: Lightning Talk

This week we gave a presentation about our progress for our project. We will be meeting with Dr. Viswanathan to discuss the analysis of our linkage design this week. A link to the presentation is shown below.

Week 1: Spring Semester

The Spring semester has begun and we have taken the time to review our design. The components that need to be machined can be manufactured by ourselves so we will begin to look into purchasing parts for the assembly.

Week 15: Presentation 3

Today was the last session of the Fall semester. We presented our last presentation to the class, shown below. From this week on we will be finalizing materials and starting our final report for this semester.

Week 14: Preparing for Presentation 3

This week we were updated on the other sub-team's progress. We are preparing for our final presentation and hope to have our analysis complete by then. We need to find the force the actuator will be experiencing under acceleration from the bogies. Also, FEA analysis was done on the new linkage assembly shown below. The lowest safety factor of the new linkage assembly is 1.69, which occurs in the top horizontal links.

Week 13: Starting the code for the active components

This week, we researched about what we would need to power and run the linear actuator. We found that we would need an accelerometer, gyroscope, motor driver, Arduino, and external batteries to do so. Fortunately, Professor Furman has a motor driver we can borrow so we will be using that with a linear actuator found in the Spartan Superway shop. We will dive into the coding process before Thanksgiving break.

Week 12: CAD Revisions

This week we were able to revise our design by shortening the overall vertical length of the suspension. The CAD assembly is shown below. With this new design, the actuator is placed directly in the middle of the linkage so there isn't an internal bending moment within the design. The linkage can achieve a range of 19 degrees in incline to 24 degrees in decline, which is suitable for our purpose.

Figure 1: Revised CAD Design