Small Scale Switch Design Team 2019

Second Week | 7/8/2019 - 7/12/2019: More Designs Monday was a long day.  But a fun and interesting day no less!  We began our day by meeting with Ron and Eric (the latter calling in from skype), we discussed about Ethan and Jacques-Hariel designs introduced in the last blog article. We spent a big part of the morning discussing about these designs and how to improve them. The conclusion was to finish the designs in order to be able to analyze the advantages and  disadvantages of each one and then choose the final solution. By the afternoon, we worked on the gantt and finally created the template. We got some difficulties to translate the template because Jacques-Hariel started it on is french version of Excel. We structured the project but now we must plan each task (give deadlines) in order to optimize the time of the project and being sure to achieve each objective. This part of the work will be done by Tuesday the 16th. The main lines ...

First Week -- 7/1/2019 - 7/5/2019: Getting started July, 5th 2019 We began this week by getting to know each other and getting introduced to the small scale superway project. To begin, we (David, Jacques and Ethan) met with Prof. Furman, Mr. Swenson, and Mr. Hagstrom (who called in remotely). We talked about the project, and we brainstormed some ideas for the guideway’s construction, as we can see in the picture below. In addition, David gave us (Ethan and Jacques) an overview of how the control system works and the existing issues (motor, wheels, etc). On the track we have two principal problems: The curved parts and the switch area. Regarding the curve, Prof. Furman proposed to divide the curved part into several little parts that we can make by water jet and then assembly them. Perhaps make it out of two parts in an L shape with box joint style joinery between.  We also discussed the possibility of using different materials (wood, Mdf, or metal) for the track ...