Week 3 - Group Time

Today we did not do much. First we listened to a "lecture" about a report we will need to do soon and examples about how it should or could be done with given examples. I can't remember much of it however after that ME195 meeting we met up at the SSDC, or also known as the Spartan Superway Development Center, I think. At the SSDC Ron gave us a talk on why the presentation that Okamoto gave would have been given an F grade in the Superway project, he talked about how there was too much text and that is a distraction from what the speaker is saying. Anyways, after all that we met up with our respective teams in the project, I met up with the Project Management team and talked about what we need to do and what needs to be done. I talked to David about how the team is going and how half the people from the original team left to join Wayside power. I don't get people half the team left to do wayside power, if anything that is the easiest think to do for this project especially since one its mainly adding a rail to the track, and two its for the small scale project. So that happened, last week. Now I have a group of 8, 9 including myself, that has to get the track design done and then produced next semester, the controls and safety system developed, buy a team of three mainly, and build more carts.

So I did my best to direct a sinking ship. First I talked to each of my team leads and now I decided that we need to first decided on a final track design that we will use for the rest of the semester. Second we need to build the cart's bogey system, and the way side rail system based on that track. We still haven't decided on whether it will be the current design, or a new design where the rails are stacked on top of each other like the intermediate scale. Oh that's another think, theres three scale, small, intermediate, full; honestly I though it was just small and full, but we don't even have a full scale project. We decided for a two week time span to decided on the final track design and we will come back to it on the 30th. By then we should have a design that we can work on for the bogey, control system, and wayside rail. Other stuff will come along as we go, but I have given from the time were done witht he decision to the end of the semester to design everything around the track so it works efficiently.

After all that I also introduced my design for a location system tot he controls lead, but he said he had something else in mind so lets hope that works, If not then we'll use my design because its simple and it will work, hopefully. After the short time we had with our teams it was time for me to head over to ME147 to take vibrations.

I will have a post with my location system design up soon.