Small Scale Controls Team

The first of three Senior Project Presentations were delivered today. Please refer to our presentation, embedded below. The objective of our presentation was to discuss our team goals as well as our refined, conclusive design specifications. Our presentation can be divided into five sections: (1) the overarching aspirations of the SPARTAN Superway team; (2) past semesters’ accomplishments; (3) how we, the current Small-Scale Controls Team, will improve, expand upon, and fix last year’s designs; (4) team member responsibilities for the 2018-2019 year; and (5) a Gantt Chart planning out our Fall 2018 timeline. Although we stated, in our Presentation #1, that Patrick would oversee the software side of the small-scale model and David would be in charge of the hardware, our duties will more than likely overlap with each other due to the interdependent nature of controls and mechatronics systems. In other words, a circuit and a controller are meaningless without the hardware, while

Today, Colin, a member of last year’s Small-Scale Controls Team and possibly our mentor/contact/guide, visited the Spartan Superway Design Center to provide us with advice, problems his team faced, features that they were hoping to implement but never got around to, and feedback on the design ideas we proposed.   Addressing our first idea of installing a differential drive system that would drive the wheels that move along the outer rail faster than the inner wheels when making a turn, preventing over-exertion of the servo motor steering the wheels when making a turn , Colin stated that we have two options: (1) Use two servo motors and incorporate the drive differential. However, Colin warned that he and his team used up all of their extra servo motors (about six extra) during their exhibition at Make’s Faire. So, he suggested buying three servos for each day spent at the Faire (three servos x three days = nine servos). If we want to pursue this idea, he suggested looking int