Engineering Projects/Steam Engine/Project2

Week0 Preferences

Your class negotiated 5 or 6 projects to do the rest of the semester. Please rank, in order of preference, your highest through lowest project names.

Week1 Narrative

On 9/18/2013 my team and I had to learn to write with arduino's. At first we set out with 3 research days to understand the code. I downloaded the arduino program onto the computer to run the chip and througth trial and error on the examples, I learned how to make the LED blink, but the mapping of the bread board was taxing and I feel I don't have the time to work with blinking lights.

On 9/19/2013 I had to look-up the possible stepper motor functions. I didn't know what wires go were and what pins did what.

Week2 Narrative

On 9/23/2013 I finally got my hands on a stepper motor to practice with. My team and I still haven't made the calculations on the polar printer due that our time is being taken up on trying to program them. I fear we didn't distribute tasks. I picked up a shield for my Arduino to work with, no matter what I did my motor was still being difficult; the motor was running but the wheel wasn't moving in 360 degrees. The script for the Arduino involved the the entry into the different delay times alters the type of rotational direction speed. Even deleting the delay time causes the device to move.

9/25/2013 I set up my arduino, and combined it with an arduinio shield, and had my bread board, and 1x a-b USB cable. I went on to Adafruit to find the scripts to operate the motor set arduino to UNO board, on the COM#3. I tried out different pins to see if the connection is good. I found a promosing script code but it needs me to download the "LIBRARY" that is used to operate the code. I feel that with the motor coils are working against each other.

Week3 Narrative

On 9/30/2013 I need to get the stepper motor to function properly, but before I move further in the coding of the motor, I had to understand the motor its self. I got a voltage meter to see which wires connected to what coil in the motor. I gridded the wires in to the following organization

8 WIRE STEPPER MOTOR MAPPING

	Black 1	Yellow 1	Grey 1	Red 1	Black 2	Yellow 2	Grey 2	Red 2
Black 1	X	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO
Yellow 1	NO	X	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO
Grey 1	NO	NO	X	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES
Red 1	NO	NO	NO	X	NO	NO	YES	NO
Black 2	NO	YES	NO	NO	X	NO	NO	NO
Yellow 2	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	X	NO	NO
Grey 2	NO	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	X	NO
Red 2	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	X

I paired the wires and found that the coils were connected to 4 different wires. Brandon was tasked with the mathematical equations of the project while I was tasked with the coding for the motors. Carlos wasn't in for most of the project and I was getting worried.

Week4 Narrative

10/2/2013 I was testing the wire connections to see if I could get better use of the motor I was running the stepper test script on the motor. I tried to see if I could get the motor to spin in a precise time. "Increasing RPM's to 40, put delay on single step (2 seconds), double step is at (3 seconds), and interleave is at (1 second).

I took out the microstep command to stop the ticking motion of the motor.
During the next class Brandon and I are to make a presentation to the other teams to see if they can give us some pointers.

10/7/2013 The day wasn't very productive with the project. I was going to try to use the r=D/theta formula to measure out the rotations for the motor.

10/9/2013 I was trying to do the calculations for the calculations for the motor, but I had to focus on the coding for the motor, but in the end I wasn't able to get the motor to do most of the things that I wanted it to do.