This blog post comes almost a month after the previous post, and there’s a lot to cover, so I’ll be splitting the updates into 2 parts, part 1 and part 2. On the menu for today is:
- Apologies from me, and updates on our workflow (Part 1)
- Progress Meeting #3 (Part 1)
- Arrival of our components (Part 1)
- Testing and operation of the T6 stepper motor (Part 2)
- Testing and operation of the new push-pull solenoid actuator (Part 2)
- What’s next (Part 2)
1. Apologies and updates
First of all, as designated blog-writer and updater, I (Yu Yun) apologise for the 4-week silence after the last post. It has been a hectic month with lots of activities and adjustments, which left me less time to update the blog. It’s not really a valid excuse as everyone became busier, so in the future, what I can take away from this is: I should plan more in advance so that I can fulfill my duties properly. Once again, I’ll try to keep the posts and updates more frequent. Next, I will be recapping what happened since the last post.
28 July was the last official week of the Special Term II of AY19/20, and in the following week, our members were mostly busy with the various Transition Orientation Programmes (TOP) for the incoming freshmen. We planned to go to the MnT lab on the following Thursday (6 Aug) to test one of our prints, after the faculty TOP for all of us had ended. We were informed a few days after that, however, that there would be another progress meeting/presentation on the day we wanted to go to the lab, so we were not able to get much done before then. We also placed new orders for a T6 stepper motor and new push-pull type solenoid actuators.
On 5th Aug, we printed a way to attach things to the fan’s body through inserting two screws and using friction to hold the attachment to the fan, but I had grossly underestimated the size of the fan.
Hence, I edited the length and sent it for printing again.
At the same time, our original design using eight solenoid actuators faced the problem of the whole bar popping out and off the contraption when the spring decompresses. As a result, we lost many springs, greatly hindering our progress with the design. Eventually, we were down to one spring and we decided to ditch the design and focus all our efforts on the stepper motor design. Below is a video of the design that we abandoned.
We included all these in our slides for the progress meeting, which will be covered in the next section.
2. Progress Meeting #3
In a nutshell, we did not make much progress since the previous progress meeting. What happened was, we tried and tried, and failed and failed, and our presentation was just a summary of what we tried and our failures. The link to the presentation can be found here, and it can also be found in the “Media Links” tab at the top of the page.
Moving on from here, Glen did the code for the control of the stepper motor using an A4988 motor driver. At this point in time, the new semester was starting in the following week, and we realised our timetables do not really allow all four of us to meet up on a fixed day of the week. We decided that we will have two routine slots, one on Tuesday, and another on Friday.
3. Arrival of our components
On 9 Aug, our stepper motors arrived. To protect the fan’s body from scratches from the screws from our new design of attaching things to the fan, we also bought some EVA Rubber pads, and tested the reprinted design with the pads on 11 Aug, which seemed to work.
The new solenoid actuators arrived on 16 Aug, and that means that we can start our testing with gusto after 2 weeks of relatively low activity. Full speed ahead! (or so we thought)
The next time we planned to go to MnT lab was on 18 Aug, and our objective was to get the stepper motor working. As this blog post is getting long, it will be continued in the next post: Finally, some progress! (Part 2 of 2)