We designed a simple battery monitor (using Arduino’s internal voltage sensor + LED light + some coding) for the system such that when the battery’s voltage (normally about 12-12.5V) falls below 11.5V, the LED will light up with an orange color to indicate to the technicians that the battery is low and needs to be recharged/replaced. This video shows the battery lit up to indicate a low battery scenario (for this video, the code was modified for the light to be turned on when the battery was ABOVE 11.5V).

We first attached the clamping system to the lifting system via the car gear joint system (v1). It seems to be able to provide the rotation we need (to bring the 1.7m unit into the train which has doors of about 1.45m wide)

car gear joint v1 rotating

However, we also realised with Tony’s help that the rotation ability might not be so good for safety/structural integrity as the pneumatic unit can swing very widely when it is lifted up to mid-air, as shown by this video.

car gear joint v1 scary

Thus, it will require careful handling on the technicians’ part.

Another problem with this car gear joint was that one joint is not enough to provide the rotation we need to install the pneumatic unit into the train. The unit needs to be rotated about 90-180 degrees for the installation, and this was not possible with just one joint. Thus, we added another joint using a series of aluminium profiles, and proceeded to test the system.

This is us testing:

Finally, we tried to test the lifting ability. However, this was put on hold by the need to readjust the connection to the CG exactly + a few additional reinforcements