2/15/2017 to 2/22/2017

After failing several times with wood, the team decided to move on to the backup plan which is 3D printing out the gears. This week, the gears are printed out with ABS. The team assembled the gear together on the wood board, and test the gear set with a sample ironic strip, and the strip was successful corrugated. With the gears successfully made, the team will be able to make corrugated metal strips in large volume.

02/09/2017-02/16/2017

In this week, our team tried to use the wood board to create two set of gears which used for manufacturing the corrugated metal strip by hand. Unfortunately, we failed. At the beginning, we used a wood board which thickness is 1cm. After we cut out all the teeth of the wood gear, we realized the teeth are very brittle. When two gears rotated for making the strip, one of the teeth broke. Therefore, we decided to use a thicker wood board which is 2cm to do it again.

Manufacturing the thicker one is a lot harder than the old one. Especially, when we tried to make the teeth, we had met a lot of trouble. Firstly, we could not make the same distance between each tooth by hand. It will cause the unequal distance between the peaks of the corrugated metal strip. Secondly, at the tip of the teeth, we needed to sand it a little bit. It can make the rotation smooth. When we sanded it, we needed to be really careful. It is because the width of each teeth required minimum 3mm. Under that much limitation conditions, we realized we failed again. Fortunately, we had a backup plan which is 3D print. We asked help from our friend who has a 3D printer. Also, we start to draw it out by Solidworks. The gear set could be done by next week.

02/01/2017-02/08/2017

At the beginning of this semester, vehicle position sensing will focus on manufacturing the corrugated metal strip. Due to the limitation of the budget, we have to give up our original idea which was using 3D printer to make the strip. Instead of that, we will try to make it by our own.

In this week, in order to manufacturing the corrugated metal strip, we talked to the track manufacturing team. They do not have time to help us about it, but they gave us some useful suggestion. For example, we are going to make to gears for manufacturing the strip. They told us some their experience how to make a perfect gear.

So far, we already made two perfect cylinder. Also, we plan to finished the gear teeth and install them to a platform in the following week. The team is looking for steel sheet supplier which can provide us cheap and thin iron sheet. Because there will be no load acting on the corrugated metal strip, the properties of the metal does not matter as long as it can be easily corrugated. In the moment, we are looking for steel sheet with gage 28 or 30.

The program of the corrugated detection was finished. However, we still need to integrate our part with the vehicle control team because our programs share location information together.

Week 12/01 to Week 12/07

For this week, the most time we spent on was preparing our final presentation and first draft report.  In addition, our team is focusing on doing the final testing the position sensing system with a constant speed. Through the testing, we realized the speed that the sensor can sense is about 20cm/s. Since the vehicle control team have not determine the speed of the bogie yet, we cannot test the actual bogie speed in our system. Lastly, due to sensor mount is not perfect as what we expected, the sensing result is not very stable. Therefore, we did some adjustment the sensor mount. 

Week 11/13 to 11/30

 The corrugated metal strip the team made was not fit for the track, thus the team sent out several quotes to nearly 10 companies that sell customizable metal parts. It was Thanksgiving Week, there were no shipping and other services until Monday of the next week. However, there was no reply from these companies.

The team designed a 3D model for one segment of the replacement of the corrugated metal strip. The design was shown in figure 1. The price for 3D printing the segment with stainless steel in order to cover the whole track was determined to be about $400. However, since there was no offering price from any companies for bending a corrugated metal strip with the team’s original design. The 3D printing price cannot be evaluated or compared.

Week 11/17 to 11/23

In this week, our team already finished the final designed of the sensor mount. And we will use 3D printer to make in the coming week. However, the corrugated metal strip we got from last week was not idea as what we thought. Firstly, its distance between peaks was not really accurate as we want. Secondly, the square wave shape was not good either. Therefore, we just contacted with a 3D printer show. And we think it will be more accurate.

Moreover, we found out another problem is which side the strip should set on the track. At the beginning, we wanted set it on the inner orbit. Nevertheless, we realized when the bogie get into the parking place, the outer orbit has to have the strip. In this case, the bogie should have both side sensor. Otherwise, we could not determine the position when the bogie get into the parking place. So we will try to solve this program during the coming week.

Week 11/9 to 11/16

This week, the team had talked to the software development team regarding to the algorithm of position sensing. After the discussion, the team decided to use the station ID as one of the reference for position sensor. However, after meeting with the software development team, the team also found we need to have reference for position sensing after track switching, and the issue will be discussed with the control team about the magnet and sensor they will be using.

The team gathered and came up with a design on the holder for the sensor with the new magnet. However, the CAD drawing was not able to be completed in this week after the team spending significant amount of time on designing a proper holder.

Since November is ending, the team will arrange more meetings at the end of the 3^rd week if November and the 4^th week because of the holidays. Hopefully, the sensor holder will be completely built.

The team like to test the sensors on a piece of corrugated sheet metal with fine corrugations. However, the corrugated sheet metal is not arriving and the website does not provide any tracking resources. The sheet metal will be cut in to strip and tested after its arrival.