Sunday, May 21, 2017

Week 05/11 to 05/17

In this week, the position sensing system cannot be used in the Maker Faire event, so we are focusing on how to help other teams. In addition, we need to make sure the corrugated metal strip will not get off which may affect the bogie moving.
Moreover, we had a final presentation in this week, so we spent most of the time to prepare it.

Final Presentation (Position Sensing Team)

Sunday, May 14, 2017

week 05/04 to 05/10

In this week, our team did the last test with app team. Unfortunately, the result was disappointed. The position sensing system is completed, we have the position sensor and the corrugated ferrous strips ready.
We first tested the sensor on the bogie with the completed program. The accuracy was 20% and it was low, but very precised.
We retested the system with some sensor commented out, especially the ultrasonic sensor, the accuracy increased to eighty percent. The Mobile App team and us confirmed that the run time of the program was too long for the position sensor to detect and count all the peaks as expected.
The mobile app team and the control team decided to reconnect some of the sensors to the interrupt pins, such as the hall effect sensors and the ultrasonic sensors,and wish to increased the loop time of the program. However, the accuracy of the position senors was even lower,  there is still something blocking the position sensing code.
The program could be solve by moving the position sensors to the interrupt pins too. However, because maker faire is approaching, the teams are trying to be conservative, and we have no idea what the will bring to the overall program if two of the sensers are on the interrupt pins.
Therefore, there would not be enough time for us to finished the programming and testing in this semester. 

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Week 04/27 to 05/03

In this week, our team focused on fixing the corrugated metal strips, especially for the curve position. After we did the test for the sensor, we found that when the bogie passed the curve, some of the peaks of the strips would miss data. It means the sensor was not close enough to the strips. Therefore, we took off all the corner strips, and add a double tape between strips and track. It could reduce the distance between the sensor and the strips.
In addition, the sensor bracket was not as good as what we expected, so we designed another one. Also, we will test on Thursday or Friday.