Weekly Update: Week 4

It was another productive week which is great news. First I'm going to talk about what tweaks we made to our project, including some decisions we made on the design. Then I'll cover the progress made over the past few days.

Design & Parts:
     During our last lab meeting we had a decision to make. We could either make our own board that would control the voltage to the RC motor or order a Arduino Motor Shield. We decided to go with the latter. The cost difference was only $10 while the potential for problems further down the road were much higher. We ordered the Arduino Motor Shield and it finally came in the mail this week.

 
    Another question we needed to answer was how we were going to power the board, sensor, and motor. After some research we decided to power the components using a 9V battery. In order to do so we needed to order a cable that would allow us to connect the battery to the Arduino. This also came in the mail this week.

     We also bought a small valve tubing to help connect the tubing to the bladder.

     Even with all this progress, there are some design problems still left to solve. One of them was how would we rotate the canister with the balloon. We think we've come up with a solution that should keep the design aspect simple and clean. I'll add another update when we visit the machine shop in a few days.

Weekly Progress:
    Over the past week we've made some progress. We got the Arduino to control the motor. We played around with how the motor is controlled by the Arduino and familiarized ourselves with how it works.

     We also collected data from the accelerometer to see how its effected by movement. All these data points will be used to help the algorithm know when to deploy the bladder. It was just data collection of the accelerometer when its in different positions.

     The final part we worked on was getting the motor to turn when the accelerometer went through certain shocks. We were able to get the motor to turn which was great news. It means that we will be able to release the CO2 from the canister using data readings from the accelerometer.

Future:
     We still need to make some progress on getting the different components to work independently first. We should start integration of the parts in a couple weeks. Our next hurdle is to get the motor to turn the CO2 canister.