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Ah yes
Kids...EGR 345. You know, as I update this, I can't help but think
about a couple of weeks from now. All the hard work will pay off
in the form of our final project and we'll all look back on the semester
and have a few good laughs.....not before we're all sitting on bar
stools trying to numb the pain of the last three months!!! As it comes to a close though I must say it's been tough, shitty, great, fun, and terrible all in one semester. We've learned a ton, will have forgotten most of it by exam time, and lost a lot of sleep along the way. Second Co-Op here we come. I guess as I update this page, I do it as kind of a farewell to this class. Can't wait to say goodbye, but I know it's only helped to prepare us for the real world and semesters to come. But now to get to the real point of this page, the contents of which are mostly the final project. This years final project was to design a small gantry crane that would incorporate active damping control by way of position and sway feedback. The software was written in C, and an Axiom M68HC11 microcontroller was used. Now for any of you non engineering types that are either checking this page out as friends or just happened upon the page, try and follow me here. A 1 kg mass was to be suspended 40 cm from the bottom of a 2x4 by whatever creative cart thing we came up with. As for our group, we came up with a basic box design on top of which a motor sits. A 2" diameter pulley is attached to the end of the drive shaft. A 1/2" diameter pulley is coupled by a urethane belt to the driven wheel which is coupled to an encoder by a plastic shaft. The encoder provides feedback control for position, while a potentiometer is attached to the swing arms which support the mass. The softwares purpose is to drive the cart using a motion profile generated when the user types in a value from 0 -9. This moves the cart up to 20 inches in increments of 2 inches. As the cart comes to its final position, the sway compensation built in to the controller turns on and the cart magically stops the sway and comes to a stop. Preliminary tests of the cart revealed stopping times of around 4 seconds which was pretty competitive I might add. This wasn't after a slew of problems though, mostly related to the cheap ass planetarty gearbox motor selected to run the cart. It got the job done though. Now I'd like to send a shout to all the 345 kids and say lets have a laugh for a second though as who knows how many Axiom boards we broke and/or fried in the process of designing and testing these things. For now, the final project report follows, and the drawings, cost report, weight analysis, and test results will follow. I'll also post results of the competition which takes place on November 25th for all to review. I've also posted the Lab 3 stuff, which was the initial purpose of starting this web page madness to begin with. Later kids! Final Project
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