Monday, April 25, 2016

April 2016 Update

The project this semester has been a practice in comunication and design alteration due to oversights and lack of communication in our first semester.

The first big problem came when we realized nobody had been working on propulsion design the entire first semester.  Apparently, groups either didn't think of it or thought someone else was going to work on it.  So we needed a motor that would be small enough to fit on the bogey and powerful enough to propel it up the slopes we added in to the track.  I volunteered for the duty of finding the motor and working out propulsion, with the help from others in my group and the EE team.

Unfortunately, the scale we had chosen the previous semester alongside the increase in power needs for going up and down slopes made finding a motor very difficult.  In the end, even the smallest motor I could find that fit our power and torque requirements was so large we had to move its location to between the two bogey sections.  We ended up choosing the Crystalyte 408, a hub motor built for electric bikes, with the 4825 controller.  It will need to output 0.6 HP and exert 95.5 N-m to get the podcar up the slope.

The motor and controller arrived on 20 April 2016 and I obtained epoxy and rubber tires to fit around the motor.

The next steps are to finalize the motor mount which will press the motor wheel into the ceiling of the track, and to interfact the controller with an Arduino to control the bogey.

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