The State of Things April 4, 2006
Posted by Tyler in Design, Fabrication, Meetings.add a comment
As of today, we've managed to collect almost all of our parts. We are still shy on of our motor/servos needed for the focal adjustment, but things are in the works tonight. This particular piece of technology is proving difficult to come up with as nothing seems to meet the specifications and requirements needed. More on that later.
As of Sunday night, we've got a good idea of where this project is heading. Erik and Evan have both spent some time machining parts for the project and come up with some good preliminary results. Unfortunately, because of design modifications and new servo/motor changes, we may need to remachine these parts to get everything to fit. However, this has yet to be finalized. We did some additional machining today while in "lab" down in Etcheverry. John has been diligently working on the coding now that we have an idea of what we were doing with the servos. Several of us (mostly John) spent some time today trying to isolate what signal was needed for proper control. It looks like the DSP board doesn't work the way we need it to (something about the frequency output not being right and a few other problems, but John has some fixes in the works for that). Right now several of us are trying to come up with an alternative step motor to run the focal ring. The winch servos we were tossing around Sunday night just move too slow for what we need, so we're gonna have to go with a step motor to maintain that element of position control already in the servos, but the speed we need from a motor. We managed to bounce some ideas off of the GSIs during our "hardware presentation" during lab. We considered using an optical encoder, an optical interference sensor (something like that), and using one of the slower winch servos but with a bigger gear, all to maintain that speed and position control combination we so desperately need. By tomorrow we need to order what it is we're going to use since our time to put this all together is slowly winding down (we've only got four weeks left!). On top of all that, we still have to write a report and make the website (which is what you're reading – it's a work in progress!). It's gonna get fun with some really long nights!
It Has Been Decided February 6, 2006
Posted by Tyler in Concept, Meetings.add a comment
After a brief meeting last night, the group has decided to go ahead with the adjustable headlight project idea (and just in time too). Tyler will be working on the project proposal body while the rest of the group comes up with sketches to submit tomorrow in class.
