Week 3

We finally got some sense of clarification on what was expected of us for this project. Up until this point, I had no clear plan of action on how to improve upon what last year's bogie controls team had done. We have our deadlines now and I was able to work with my team to set up a working schedule of what we wanted to accomplish by set dates. My team and I had a brief meeting with Eric and Professor Furman to sort out any questions we had about the project and what course of action we should take to improve the design of the bogie controls. My team had partly agreed to replace the barcode sensing system with magnetic encoding to be able to track the position of the bogie as well as determine whether the bogie should switch its path. This idea arose from a team that wants to completely redesign the whole track and incorporate a magnetic strip on the track that we could use to accomplish our goals for bogie controls. I attempted to look at other methods of sensing when the bogie should change its path. I looked at motion sensors where we can use ultrasonics or infrared light to determine if the bogie has interrupted the sensor to determine what action it should execute. I found that it might be hard to implement these sensors on the track and it might cost more money to actually buy the sensors and any other hardware we would need. Instead we would just use what we have and simplify the design.

Apart from deciding partially what my team wanted to do, I looked at the archives for our part of the project and saw that the major flaw of the project was the communication between groups. Our team and other teams decided to create a folder on Google Drive with everyone who is involved in the small scale project so that we can hopefully improve the communication gap that was present in past team's work.  I also looked at the code that was used for the barcode sensing system and I was overwhelmed at how complicated the code appeared. I am hoping we acquire some help with building the code or at least simplifying the code.

This year, I am hoping I can improve on my communication and technical skills because I am terrified of public speaking. Communication is key in this project. My fear of public speaking cannot be a reason why this project cannot become a success and I plan to leave an excellent footprint for future groups. From a past ME 106 project, I gained some knowledge on using Xbees and using other versions of the Arduino such as Arduino Pro Mini and the Adafruit Pro Trinket. I am hoping that the knowledge I learned from that project, I will be able to apply to this project in some way if applicable in the case of shrinking the hardware to smaller, efficient components or communication between our hardware. I am looking forward to seeing this project become a success and seeing a working small scale model of the project.