Week 4 (Sept. 19, 2018)

On week 4 of Spartan Superway, we had to meet up with the small scale control team coach Colin. He was of great help, because he walked us through every single detail we had to know. He throughly  explained why they chose Python to build their GUI and how they used the Raspberry Pi to set up the android tablet. Colin pointed out that they had to learn Python on their own the same year. Which was helpful and encouraging because I do not have much knowledge in the language. He proceeded to talk about the improvement he thought had to be made from last year design.

He explained that during Maker Faire last year they had run the brushed motor for three days straight and most of them would get damaged by it. Therefore he proposed that we should perhaps select different motors to display at the fair, which we decided to be brushless motors. He pointed out that the hardest thing would be to find gearing to slow down the speed of the motors, because brushless motor tend to rotate faster.

Colin asked us to improve the app user interface, and add some features that would make the app more user friendly. We discuss about improving the cancel button, which did not really had the paccar stop at sign that were assigned to it. Also we thought of adding a cancel option to stop the pod car at the next station.

He added that the censoring should be improved by adding multi directional censing to avoid collisions. We also, discussed changing the battery of the system so that we can implement wireless charging. He pointed out that the LiPo battery they used last year required a special type of charging in order to work.  

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