Weekly Update: Week 6

     With the end of our first set of exams and papers we were able to get a lot of work done over the past few days, including the weekend. We have successfully implemented the new mechanical design for turning the CO2 canister with the servo. We also solved the problem of the accelerometer wires disconnecting from the Arduino.

     The battery pack that we ordered last week arrived in the mail on Monday.

     This is the new design for turning the CO2 canister: There is a thin steel shaft that attaches around the CO2 deploy mechanism via a small clevis. This shaft is connected to the armature of the servo. When the servo moves, the CO2 is forced up by the steel shaft and CO2 is released. when the servo moves back to its initial position, the flow of CO2 is stopped and at this point the air bladder will be appropriately filled.

     To fix the disconnection problem with the accelerometer we decided the best way was to reconnect the ribbon cables. We separated the ribbon and stripped the rubber off the end. Then we connected new wires that are better fit to fit as pins. We connected the two wires by soldering them together. On top of that, we taped them tightly with electrical tape to isolate the bare parts of the wire.

     On Monday we continued to test the motor so we could figure out how to turn it to certain positions. We ran into problems trying to figure out where it started, more specifically what it defined as "0."After a long night we called it quits and worked on it on Tuesday. On Tuesday we were more successful. We found a way to successfully make the motor start at one position and then turn to the position we needed it to. The problem was that we misunderstood how the servo was understanding out code.

    Also on Monday, we successfully found a solution to stopping the entire program after the IBS had deployed. After some confusion on how to go about doing this, we simplified the solution to just putting a really long delay.