User:Drew Dollas/enes100/Glorious3

Link back to team Glorious3

Give instructor top 3 project choice list
1. Hovercraft

2. R.O.I.T wheel robot

3. Robot Arm

Write problem statement
There are many working models of Hovercrafts, some large and some small. However, the large ones are often piloted by a person, and the smaller ones are controlled with a remote controller. To the best of our knowledge, there are not many models that utilize an autopilot system and sensors that can avoid people yet travel down a crowded school corridor.

Assign Task1
To have two working motors on the back of the hovercraft with propellers on them, to propel the hovercraft forward while the hovercraft is tethered to the generator.

Compare actual work done to Task1
I was trying very hard to get the motor that we have on our hovercraft right now to work properly. I have been completely unable to get the correct amount of power to this motor. I tried several different batteries with it. The 9-volt battery did not give enough power, and the two rechargeable batteries gave it way to much power. And when I tried putting resistors in the circuit between the motor and the power source, nothing happened at all, I tested several different resistors, an 18 ohm resistor through a 1.1k ohm resistor, and none of them worked. The motor would just not work at all, like the circuit was not complete or something. And I know that I had the circuit complete, because when I put a 18 ohm resistor in the circuit, the resistor started smoking and the motor was actually working, but that was because I destroyed the resistor. I had the resistor in between the positive side of the battery and the motor, maybe I should have put it on the negative side since current flows from negative to positive, But I have been told that it does not matter which side the resistor is on because it is all the same circuit. Also, I tried to just hook the generator up directly to the motor, but nothing would happen. The generator would read 7.0v but right when I completed the circuit, it immediately jumped down to 0v, and I made sure to have the current knob up too, so that was not the problem. In conclusion, I feel like the motor we are trying to use is messed up and it would probably be best to use something else.

Assign Task2
Get a good motor that works and get it to work with that generator

Compare actual work done to Task2
Since I could not get our motor that we were using to work with the generator, and since it could not handle the power coming from the LiPo battery, I hooked up a different, more durable, motor. And when I attached the LiPo battery to it in parallel with the two fans, it spun very fast, but the motor could handle it fine. I also worked on a Servo for controlling the speed of a motor with a potentiometer and an arduino I had trouble uploading my program onto the arduino board though. SO I do not have much to share with that.

Assign Task3
Upload my program onto the arduino board, and be able to program the servo without the pot.

Compare actual work done to Task3
I figured out how to get programs from my computer onto the board. And I got the ESC to react to the potentiometer. I could make the ESC start flashing. And once it stopped flashing, if I moved the potentiometer again, it started flashing again. I could not get the motor to really spin at all. I did not have the proper battery with me to power the ESC, so that may have been the reason it did not work. When I attached the 9-volt battery to the ESC, the ESC made a beeping noise, and the motor spun a very small amount, and then stopped.

Week3 Narrative














I used the "Servo" example to try to get the Brushless ESC working for the Brushless motor. But for some reason when I tried to upload the file, the program could not find the port that I had the USB cable plugged into on my desktop computer. So I tried using my laptop computer, and then it started working. I think it may have something to do with the fact that I had all the arduino software on my flash drive when I used my desktop computer, but when I used my laptop, the Arduino files were already on the laptop, which may have made it possible for the program to find the USB ports.

The Motor is connected to the ESC, and the ESC is connected to an Arduino Uno board, along with a battery directly connected to the ESC. I believe that I need a more powerful battery than just a 9-volt. The three colored wires coming from the ESC are white, red, and black. The black one is connected to ground on the arduino board. The red wire is connected to the 5v slot on the ardunio board. And the white one is conneted to Digital pin 9 on the arduino board. The potentiometer has three connection places on it. one far side of it is connected to the same 5v power pin on the arduino board that the red wire from the ESC is plugged into. The other far side of the potentiometer is connected to the same Ground slot on the arduino board that the ESC black wire is connected to. And the middle pin on the Potentiometer is connected to the A0 pin on the board.

Assign Task4
To get the motor to just spin using the ardunio board.

Compare actual work done to Task4
I actually got the motor to work perfectly with the potentiometer and the arduino board. When I hooked up the 11.1v LiPO battery to power the ESC, and a 9-volt battery to power the ardunio board, the motor reacted very well when I turned the potentiometer back and forth.

Week4 Narrative
I finally realized why I could not get the motor to react with the potentiometer when I was working on it last week. Last week I was using a regular 9-volt Alkaline battery to power the ESC. And this week, when I used the 11.1 volt LiPO battery, it worked very well. This is most likely because the ESC needed more power going to it in order for it to work properly with the particular motor it was connected to.
 * [Me controlling the motor with the potentiometer]

You can see that I was easily able to change the speed of the motor by just turning the potentiometer back and forth, and the motor reacted, changing speeds, pretty soon after I moved the Potentiometer, it did not need more then 2 seconds to react to my input.


 * [Us noticing that the air is blowing the wrong direction]

Here is where we realized the motor was spinning the wrong way. in order to fix this I am thinking that I can just attach the 11.1 volt LiPO battery backwards to the ESC, so that the power wire from the battery is attached to the ground wire from the ESC, and the ground wire from the battery to the power wire from the ESC. But I am not able to test this right now, so I do not know if this is true or not.

Also, we need to find a better way to connect the LiPO battery to the ESC, because we do not have the correct connectors, and I have been using two different alligator clips to attach to the battery and then I have just two regular wires connecting the ground and power from the ESC to the alligator clips coming from the battery. Using this methods I have witnessed several sparks and what looks like a few burn marks on the ESC connector. Also, it is hard to keep the circuit complete because the wires can easily separate from the connector.

One other note, the computers in our school did not have up-to-date software that could recognize my Arduino Uno board, so I downloaded up-to-date software onto my laptop, and just used that instead. And it worked perfectly.

Complete Project Page
Follow the "project done" format.

Start Next Project Week0 activities
Get the motor to spin in the opposite direction it is spinning in now. After that, it will be time to figure out how to connect the remote controller to the arduino board so that it will be possible to control the speed of the motor with the controller instead of the potentiomenter.