03/09/2017-03/15/2017

In this week, our team was focusing on programming the position sensing system. The idea was to create a function which counts for once when one of the sensors detects a signal change from HIGH to LOW, calculates the corresponding distance from the counts, and display the distance of the podcar from the last station. The program was finished, but the team is facing a problem of experiencing a high-frequency signal change of the sensors if the podcar stops at a position where the sensor detects a portion of the peak. The team is planning on adding a LOW PASS DIGITAL FILTER to our program. Hopefully, the problem can be solve with the low pass digital filter.However, we are trying to get advice from the app development team first.

Attached is the presentation 1 from our team:https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2G9D1-TIftEQkZlRDJIRUliMWc

03/02/2017-03/08/2017

In this week, our team mainly focused on the presentation. In order to display the precision of our sensing system design, we made speed testing device. This device was made by a circular wood board, a corrugated metal strip, and a Hall Effect sensor. We fixed the strip on the edge of the wood board, and also we fixed the Hall Effect sensor on another wood board. The distance between sensor and the strip would be about 3mm. The outlook will be shown below(Figure 2).

In addition, we also did some improvement for the device which used for making the corrugated metal strip. The outlook will be shown below also(Figure 1).

Figure 1:                                                                       Figure 2:

02/23/2017-03/01/2017

In this week, our team already found the acceptable sheet metal. The gage of the sheet metal is 30 which was what we expected. We decided to use this sheet metal for our corrugated metal strip. We cut a small piece from the sheet metal for testing. The result was promised. Therefore, we decided to use it for our project. Our next goal is cut the piece out from the sheet metal. The width of the piece will be 5mm.

In addition, we refined the gear set platform. We added a base for the platform in order to level it. We found the gears would be pushed apart when bending the metal strip. Thus, we add a piece of wood to connect the top of the two screws. The added wood piece would keep the gears together. The refined gear set works perfectly with our new sheet metal. Our team is ready for corrugated metal strip fabrication.