Week 10

During the past week, my team and I were engaged in testing our controls system on the track along with the software from the mobile app team and the positioning team. Unfortunately, we did not have that much time as we wanted to test on a complete track and some fixes need to be made to ensure smooth operation of the podcars on the track. Our team also participated in our first big event which was the Paseo Prototyping Challenge this past Saturday April 8th. Chris and I made the San Jose Mercury News paper. I was surprised to see a photo of us on the paper but it was a great experience. While at the event, we saw some issues that need to be fixed. We experienced issues with spacing on the track where the podcar slowed down at some locations because of tight spots. Some of the brackets used to house the hall effect sensors kept getting caught on the corrugated metal strip. We also experienced issues with some of the brackets since the hall effect sensors would sometimes miss a reading of a magnet and thus switching of the lever arms did not occur. It was most unfortunate that the software of the app team and the positioning team did not function as it was expected due to not enough time for testing. We also had to constantly supervise the podcars as they were moving around the track to avoid collisions when the podcars merged paths around the outer and inner loops and at the stations. That is another issue we need to address and fix.

Our presentation was postponed until this coming week since the 1/12th scale team had the Paseo event coming up. Thus, our team and I have also been busy with preparing for our second presentation of the Spring 2017 semester. There are some fixes that need to be done to our final designs and more testing needs to be done to ensure that we meet the deliverables assigned to us at the beginning of the academic year. Our team will also begin to contact Gene Nishinaga to see if we can use his software on our system.