Small Scale Switch Design Team 2019

Seventh weeks - 08/12- 08/16/2019 This week we had a meeting on monday and we discussed about the work of the new students and their program. In this topic, the monday meeting have been moved to wednesday, according to the first day of SJSU students.  Overall the two main topics this week are the RFI questions and Jacques-Hariel's design on small scale podcar integrating sensors.  Jacques-Hariel and David (Mapapa) work on the small scale approched by Bill James on design and control system. Currently the principal sensors and actuators we are working to integrate are  : -Pixycam : Recognize shapes and colors  -Ultrasonic : This one has already been used on the 1/12th scale podcar to detect any other podcars on the track.  -Accelerometer : Fixed inside the podcar, it measure the acceleration in 3 principal axis and then allow to determine the position of the podcar in space.  -Tof (Time of Flight) : Also used to detect obstacles -Servo : Used to rotate

Fifth and sixth weeks - 07/29- 08/09/2019 Last week (07/29 - 08/04) was a really interesting working time. We had the visite of Bill James from Oklahoma, funder of JPods and he has brought with him some gears. Electronic components, lazercutted parts for the track, a 3D printed podcart and his softweres. Overall, the most important thing was his enthusiam and knowlodge about PRT system and our commun (the whole team and him) desire to see this built. A long this week, Ron, Bill, Ethan, Thomas, Husain and Jacques worked on JPods small scale track to get it operating. We met many issues on the assembly and needed to modify some parts. We figured out together how to resolve that and after some days, we came up with the track which still need some improvement but works fair enough as reference for improvement.  Bill ajusting the track The track  The switching area Beside the work in the design center, we talked and worked on the business aspect of all of this.

Fourth week 7/22/2019 - 7/27/2019 : (More) Improving Designs On monday meeting at 4pm with Ron, Pr. Furman, Eric, Ethan and Jacques-Hariel we talked about the designs of the last week. We introduced Thomas (Jisup) who is an industrial design major and he talked with Pr. Furman about his participation in the projet and about the work done by the last industrial design majors. We had another meeting at 6h30 with Daniel and he gave some ideas to simplify the switch of the 2 floors bogie (crank rod system) and proposed to make the switch axis smaller to improve the stability. Jacques-Hariel worked on this from tuesday until the and of the week and modified the 2 floor bogie (Bogie model 3). Bogie Model 3 Bogie Model 3.1 On the model 3.1, the switch axis is smaller (on top) and servo (in blue) is rotated to decrease the number of parts. However, this system is kinematiclly not working, we you use a rod from the servo and

Third Week | 7/8/2019 - 7/12/2019: Refining Designs Meeting Synopsis We started this week with the monday 10am meeting with Ethan and Jacques-Hariel at the Superway local,  Ron and Eric on Skype. We discussed about the last designs :Two floors guideway system of Jacques-Hariel and the Single drive pair of Ethan. On the first one, Eric recommend to improve it by making it symmetrical for a better  distribution of the weight and a better stability; Maybe using 4 wheels rather than only 2 on one side.   Eric’s draft We also got a concern about the guideway system impacting the width of the podcar and some collision with the bottom part of the bogie when the podcar goes straight. Problem illustration The evening we got a  meeting with the Alumini at the local, Ron and Daniel on video call. We discussed again about the last designs and manufacturing aspect. We got constructive critics about the solutions from Daniel and sereval ways to improve