Work Night 1.3.19

Work Night

Date: 1.3.19
Location: Logan HS
Time: 4:30-7:00 PM
Students: Thaying, Paige, Alex, Thomas, Tanner, Avery and Seth.
Goal: Solder the surface mount components for our Buck Boost charging system and work on improvements to the generator mount.

Great progress tonight! We started to solder the surface mount components in the charging system. This is not an easy process as surface mount soldering requires an entirely different level of concentration and attention to detail.

Everything was going well until we started to solder on the Buck Boost chip. It was soldered in with the orientation in such a way that only 7 of the 8 pins were touching. We need to get another chip ordered to try again. Unfortunately, that chip is on back order so we cannot complete the circuit until that comes in. We are going to try to heat up the leads on the old chip and move it back into position on the board. This could lead to some cross connection in the traces but we have to give it try.

The software side of things are looking more promising. The App creator and the Arduino are interfacing. We are using two different types of software to accomplish that which creates it own problems of its own. Austin changed some of the code on the Arduino and we lost some connectivity so he will have to trace that back. Caitlin is working on the App interface.

Caitlin also is ready to take the Sustainability test. To her credit this has taken a lot of time on her part to study and prepare for it. We have had a problem with tax exempt status from SolidWorks which creates a financial headache for us to get this cleared up.

Our fundraising window has started. We have posted information in the Alumni newsletter, on the school webpage and district Facebook page. We will continue to seek donations to cover the cost of travel and to purchase a CNC Router for the TE Dept.

Data from motor tests.

Alex soldering surface mount components for the charging system.

Thomas created the rectifier  circuit for testing. This will eventually be put on a circuit board.

Paige updating the engineering journal.

Thomas soldering surface mount components.

Seth working on a design for the generator mount to be 3D printed.

Tanner mounting the heel adapter linkage which was just 3D printed.

Sketch of new generator mount.

Sketch of heel adapter linkage

Soldering surface mount components.

Some additional thoughts on the generation system from our industry professionals:

1) current generator will provide only about 3% , so about every 5 cycles we may be able to operate electronics- very rough estimate, need to run experiments to refine!
2) Alternative generators in hand can easily double that capacity(samples 103 and 105 evaluated by students)
3) Looking at a modification to sample 103 to increase capacity to about 20% (rewind armature with 32 AWG wire in place of existing 36 AWG wire)

(The sample notation refers to testing Alex and Thomas did on sample generators. Each generator was labeled with a sample number.)

Have made a full capacity special design sample, but ran into some construction challenges-  may return to it later if I can resolve these.
Some online-available generators have adequate capacity but are discouraging in their large  size, and probably have large mechanical losses,.

If a bilateral generator system is used, we may be able to double capacity. Also, they could be wired in reverse generator polarities, so one generator would increase capacitor positive side voltage, while the parallel generator increases negative side voltage. this would aid total energy storage.