Sunday, October 25, 2015

Weekly Progress Report Part 2 10/18 - 10/24



This past Thursday, we met with Mr. Lin and succeeded in creating a block system diagram which we will follow in order to create and connect the launcher to the vision system. We decided which point would be the divider in what our group will do and what the vision system will do.  We came to the agreement that we need to figure out first how we are actually going to receive the data being sent from the vision group (as the computer will already have processed the information and have sent the velocity and other info such as projected position). Thus we really need to look into the wireless receiving capabilities of the cortex micro controller and see if we can send the info to the cortex micro controller via some open source method. If we can’t find an open source method to do so then we will look to see if someone has figured out how to hack the cortex micro controller to give it data receiving capabilities.  If that path fails then we will have to see if something has been done on the PIC micro controller as it has been around much longer thus it is much more likely that someone has either hacked it or there is an open source method for receiving data.  Then we need to get the micro controller to process the data and send the corresponding command to the launcher and have it fire at the projected position of the drone. We will proceed by editing our Gantt chart and making progress on our task.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Launcher Design flaws (Weekly Progress part 1)

RobotModel1.JPG
Initial launcher design

We met with Mr. Lin this week to discuss the materials list we had posted recently. He had some concerns with the design of our launcher. Firstly, the connection between the pipe that would hold ammunition and the main pipe had a very small amount of surface area, which would make it a weak connection. This would hold some risk in the future, as it might be easily breakable. A possible alternative to this was using a T shaped connector, and attaching pipes to both sides of that to act as the barrel (this is shown on the left side of the white board). But then there's the problem of there not being a smooth connection between all three pipe pieces.
Secondly, there was the problem of the triggering mechanism. The original design was to use a motor powered arm to push back a lever, storing potential spring energy in a spring at the end of the main pipe, then the arm would move back forward, releasing the lever and therefore the spring. Mr. Lin pointed out that the problem with this was that it would require a lot of force to push back that lever, making it a slow process to trigger the launcher. Slow firing/reload speed would be a major risk later on; if our launcher missed its first shot it might be too late to fire a second one. Mr. Lin suggested that we look into a "latch" firing system, like ones that are used in fire arms. They don't require a lot of force to fire, and are therefore much faster.