Week 04/17 - 04/24

Week 11 was pretty much about fixing stuff and more research-oriented week. The team actually received our shaft like in week 10, but it was tapped at a larger diameter. This resulted in the designed shaft to not bite the axle on the motor. Pretty much week 11 consists of my team and I look out for materials online, or any local shops to buy metal stocks. Turned out that we could not find anything. So eventually we decided to buy some aluminum stock from the previous vendor online. At 04/24, we gave our new aluminum stock to Kyle for tapping, this should be done within this week. Other than that, we also did some research on regen braking and we are still finding ways to calculate the efficiency of the regen brake.

Week 04/10 - 04/17

Week 10 was mainly about the team discussing the possibility of using an outside source or help in manufacturing both the case and shaft. The team decided that this will be an alternative way for manufacturing mainly due to the problems that Central Shop is having, broken water-jet to cut our parts. Also, since the timing of the presentation was cut down due to us having to help to move in parts from the school courtyard, our presentation schedule was postponed to 04/17. Other than that, the team also decided to do some research on how to have regen brake on the motor, and will it be efficient enough to slow or stop the bogie during Makers Faire.

Week 03/27 - 04/10

Week 8 is the spring break. During spring break, and transitioning between week 8 and 9, we continued working on our issue that we found during week 7, which is the motor turned out to be unidirectional. We did some research on it, and we decided to go for welding the clutch as our primary solution. The second solution will be using a third motor, but this will be very troublesome because our team had to program the control system ourselves. Not only that, we will have to buy another timing belt that can stand the power of the third motor so that the belt will not break.

With that said, the team met up to work on the presentation, and also discuss how to solve the issue that we are dealing with. We came up with an idea to open up the motor ourselves. During our meeting at the Central Shop, we opened up the motor manually and we tried to manually turn the motor in both directions. It turned out at the motor does engage both directions: this means that the motor can move forward and backward. This solves our problem of the unidirectional thing. Next thing that we will be focusing on is implementing a braking system onto the motor.

Week 03/20 - 03/27

Week 7 of the meeting was mainly following up on our progress with the motor. Although the team is still waiting for the updates on the controller, turns out that there is another problem that our team managed to discover. The motor that we purchased is a geared hub motor, making the motor to be unidirectional. This means that the motor can only move in one direction, and will free-wheel when it is turning in the other direction. As a result, our motor will not have any braking mechanism to stop the bogie. Hence, our team decided to think of solutions that we can have to fix this issue. One solution is by modifying the inside part of the motor: including welding the motor clutch. Another solution is to use a third motor to help to stop the bogie and go in reverse direction.