Work Night 4.11.19

Work Night 

Date: 4.11.19
Location: Logan HS
Time: 5:15-7:15 PM
Students: Tanner, Seth, Alex, Paige, Austin, Thaying, Avery and Thomas.
Goal: Test the new charging circuit for functionality.

We needed to test the updated charging circuit and had a problem with one generator outputing the correct voltage. It seemed one of the generators was not functioning properly. When we cycled the tester, we were only seeing one output on the oscope. We felt it was a mechanical malfunction, but after some testing we determined both generators were functioning in the new mount we 3D printed with the (gray) supports we added for additional strength. It had to be wiring or some other electrical issue which we will have to trace down next week.

The new 12 V motors will hopefully be in next week with the 8:1 gearhead. We are hoping this adds to the durability of the generator system. The current motors we are using have a plastic gearhead.

Team members also worked on the patent information. We feel something that makes our system unique is the fact that our design does not change need to change foot of the artificial limb by adding motors or gears as in some other designs. This keeps the cost low and increases simplicity . It will work on any Freedom foot which we were told is the most popular prosthetic foot. The only thing that may need to be modified is re-3D print the heel adapter for the size of the heel. Which would cost pennies.

We also spent some time redesigning the charging port that goes in the vacuum pump. The current one is proprietary and is big and bulky. We needed to design a more streamlined one that would not be so bulky. Students found a way to modify the current adapter by doing some cutting and drilling some new openings and then using epoxy...at least that is the current plan.

UPDATE 4.15.19
We worked on troubleshooting the motor and electronics to try to trace down the fault in the circuit that was giving us zero output from one of our generators. It turns out one of the green terminal blocks was mislabeled and therefore we wired one of the generators in wrong. This was the reason we showed no output from that generator on the oscope. When we corrected it you can see the output was back to what we expected. In fact, it worked exceptionally well. The output was giving us the voltages we needed and was charging the caps and we demonstrated that by lighting up some LED's to show how the system worked. Using our safe (low charge) setting we were able to light the LED's in about 15 sec.

The oscope shows the output from our generators to our storage system.  This is important because it shows
the success of our charging system. Now we just have to tweak the software.

New supports for the motors in gray.

Thomas and Alex working on the LED array.

Seth, Tanner and Avery working on redesigning the charging adapter for the vacuum pump.