17 October 2018

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Today due to the time constraint because of the meeting on campus for all mechanical engineering students, we had to leave early. So we had to work faster and do more research with the given amount of time we had. Alex talked with Prof. Furman to see if all the ideas that we came up with would satisfy for Maker's Fair. He gave us more useful input along with things that we can improve and add to make it better. The following are the new goals that we are aiming to research before the next presentation:

  1. Block Diagram 
  2. State Machine diagram
  3. Update Justin's wiring diagram
  4. System inputs & outputs
    1. motor/sensor signals
    2. voltage/current
  5. Wireless controller
    1. display speed, position, error & path
    2. Kill Switch to cut power to the whole system
    3. Switch to engage e-brake
  6. Braking and stopping
    1. if there is a short or any malfunction, turn on emergency brakes to stop and kill power to the whole system
  7. How much voltage we need for all the components?
  8. Charging the Ultra-capacitors 
  9. Plans for using the linear actuators
  10. How to supply voltage to the motors?
  11. Motor controllers
  12. Choosing the right sensors
This is a good start to put us in the right path as the semester is coming to an end. While Alex got to talk to prof. Furman, Alan and Justin researched more about rotary encoders and BLDC motors respectively. As of now, our knowledge is very limited. The rest of the semester we plan on doing more research to further our knowledge to get things done.

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