SPARTAN Superway Week 4

This week's meeting was mostly spent listening to the presentations of the full and half-scale teams. We got some vital information as to what they are working on and where they are headed as well as what the audience was looking for in the presentations. The rest of the meeting was spent discussing various actions items between the small-scale controls team. We decided that we would meet on Mondays at 2pm from now on to work on our project.

At this week's additional meet-up, we were able to get the RFID reader to work. Once we did this, we were able to run if statements to determine if the correct RFID tag was being read. This is significant because it will be the foundation of the navigation system on the new bogie.

SPARTAN Superway Week 3

This week, we began with an introduction to the presentation that we will be giving next week. We then met with the Summer controls team to address any questions we had and get feedback from them. I then learned about the positioning system of the 1/12th scale bogie and I devised a method to make it more efficient. Currently, the bogie uses three separate forms of positioning itself. However, I believe that we could narrow that down to just one, the RFID sensor and chips.

From this point, it became my action item to research the RFID system that is in place and figure out how we could scale it up and replace the hall effect sensors and the encoder. Thus far, I have figured out how to wire the sensor and get some code in place to recognize that there is a passive chip near the sensor. However, I ran into some problems reading the information from the chip, so I have reached out for help from the Summer controls team. I will have a functional code and a flowchart by the next meeting.

SPARTAN Superway Week 2

This week, we began by giving our lightning talk that we had prepared in the previous week. We talked about what controls code is and what our plans were for the upcoming Futran track controls.

After the talk, we created a small list of deliverables to complete by the next week. This included contacting Shane to schedule a meeting where we would discuss the problems that the previous controls team faced. We have contacted him and are scheduled to meet up on 9/13/2017. The second task we assigned ourselves is to research a universal positioning system that would work better than the "counting" technique that the 1/12th scale track is currently using. Our ideas included HID, RFID, or NFC. The next thing on our task list is to read the Superway code and begin to understand it. I have read through the code twice in order to get a better understanding of how the track works. There is still a lot to learn, but I am making progress. Our final task for next week is to test all six of the bogies and try to get them in working condition.

SPARTAN Superway Week 1

For the second week of SPARTAN Superway project, I was assigned to the 1/12th scale model track in the controls group. This week we discussed our role in the Superway project as well as met the teams and groups we would be working with. I have begun looking at the documentation from previous years and trying to get a feel for how the controls code works.

This year, it will be our task to revamp the current 1/12th scale track and get it working. In addition, we will be building a new 1/12th scale track using the Futron-style track. This track will be built around the existing track to show a side-by-side comparison of the two. In the upcoming week, we will be discussing our plans for the new Futran track and deliverable goals that we need to accomplish.