Week 1
(Jan 27-Feb 2)
This week we began to get everything reorganized for our new modified project.
Because of a lack of funds we have been forced to down scale our project.
Our project will now be an actuator connected to a much smaller load (around
50 lb..) and we won't be making a platform at all for the system to sit
on. The monitor, keyboard, and micro controller are still being used,
just with a scaled down actuator. The quote that we had requested
from Enidine for the actuator was lost somewhere in transit from the Dean's
office to our advisor's office and we had to send out another one.
We have begun working on some calculations that we will use to calculate
the acceleration of the actuator and will also help us better understand
how it works.
Week 2
(Feb 3-Feb 9)
We created a first draft of the motion control simulator and decided on
all the necessary components that would be needed to create this simulator.
The part list consists of a linear actuator, an H-Bridge, motor to drive
the actuator, and the microprocessor. We were looking to buy actuators
in which the currents were approximately 30A and we needed to find an H-Bridge
to support that amount of current. Unfortunately, the H-Bridge we
found produced by the Data Device Corporation was priced at $3,279.
Digi-Key had an H-Bridge for $8.75 per chip but it would only handle 7A
of current. Since the H-Bridges are expensive we have decided to build
one ourselves.
Week 3
(Feb 10-Feb 16)
We seem to be getting no more in terms of hardware and this is causing
a major portion of our time to go unused. So it was decided that
we would work on the software that did not involve the actual movement
of the actuator. Shaun is working on the code that generates waves
at different frequencies. This code will be utilized by later modules
to generate sinusoid and step wave behavior for the actuator. Patrice
is currently working on the lcd displays. This code prompts the user
for input and gives him or her choices as to what type of output can be
produce.
Week 4
(Feb 17-Feb 23)
We are still finishing up the code from last week. We are progressing
slowly and are hoping to be finished soon. However, we are spending
more time debugging. The errors we are seeing are new to us and we
are needing to seek out the help of other individuals to solve the problems.
Week 5
(Feb 24-Mar 2)
Realizing that we are low on time and that final presentations are just
around the corner, we have been coming into lab to makeup for the time
we feel was wasted this semester and last semester looking for an actuator
that we knew was out of our price range. After having a discussion
with our advisor he realized what we were saying and agreed to go with
an actuator being used be another design team. This actuator will handle
a load of approximately 25lbs and only needs about 12 VDC. The peak
current is still too close to the maximum that the H-Bridges available
at Digi-Key can handle, so we will be building the H-Brdige and ordering
H-Drivers.
Week 6
(Mar 3-Mar 9)
We
are currently testing the LCD Modules built by Patrice to check for any
bugs or glitches. We found a few glitches and she is in the process
of fixing those glitches. She is also considering adding a backspace
option to allow the user to fix mistakes that have been entered on the
keypad by the user. However, we are still weighing the benefits of
adding this option. At this point, we are not sure is this would
be a good utilization of our time.
Week 7
(Mar 10-Mar 16)
We
have presentations on Tuesday. This presentation is an update of
the progress made on our project thus far. After this week we will
update this page and let you know how things have progressed.
Week 8 (Mar 16-Mar 23)
Week
9 (Mar 24-Mar 30)
This week we constructed the entire H-Bridge for testing that will be used
to drive our actuator. Our advisor has asked us to drive a simple
DC motor that was used in the junior spring task. Currently we have
a functional half of an H-Bridge that we tested with a voltage divider
as the load. We were unable to drive the motor on Tuesday because
we were getting a current overload at anything higher than 11 [v].
On Wednesday we met with our advisor and discovered that then H-Bridge
was meant to drive the motor because there wasn't enough current generated
to power it. After testing both halves seperately using the voltage
divider method and finding those succesful, we hooked up two power supplies
in parallel to provide enough current to the motor. This proved satisfactory
with minimal overload and we were able to drive the motor back and forth.
We also the h-Bridge in such a manner that, rather than it clicking back
and forth when the current switches positive and negative, the motor runs
in one direction with a single positive or negative current. Our
next step is to finish the code started wat back and connect everything
together. We seem to be slightly back on track.
Week 10
(Mar 31-Apr 6)
Shaun began tesing a code sample that would be able to provide a signal
to the H-Bridge with a specific duty-cycle. Patrice began writing
code that would allow the user to select the duty cycle that they wanted.
Combining the two will produce a skeleton of a user interface.