User:ZThompso7635/enes100/Model Boat

Team bottle: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Model_boat/Howard_Community_College/fall2011/502_bottle

Give instructor top 3 project choice list
Typically the instructor picks teams. Students send the instructor their top 3 choices. The project choices are typically those found at Category:General_Engineering_Projects. The instructor tries to put students in the project of their choice. Put your top three choices here after they are used to assign you to this project. Create a link to the project root and to where your team will be working.

Top 3 picks: 1. Model Boat

2. Robot Mast

3. Ice Spikes

Project root: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Model_boat

Team bottle: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Model_boat/Howard_Community_College/fall2011/502_bottle

Write problem statement
Create a small boat which can be remotely controlled, and potentially has weapons to be fired on other boats.

Assign Task1
Find boat designs and potential motors online.

Compare actual work done to Task1
Found several potential motors and electronic control systems. Several boat designs turned up. Anything between a naval ship hull or a catamaran type thing with several hulls, and an airplane shaped boat with propellers. The easiest and most likely cheapest kind of motor is a small DC powered spinning motor. Probably available at radio shack.

Week1 Narrative
My top priority for week 1 was to come up with ideas for the motor configuration that would best drive the boat with adequate speed but also allow for maneuverability. I have arrived at the conclusion that having two motors, with one mounted on each outside pontoon will work the best. If the motors speeds can be precisely controlled, the boat will be quite agile because one motor can spin one way while the other spins in the opposite direction. This will allow the boat to turn about its center axis at all times, making it extremely quick reacting.

Week1 Peer Review
Go to each team mates weekly summary wiki page. Read their activities and narrative. Then go the associated discussion page. Say something positive on this page. Try some constructive criticism. Add your name and 1sfoerster 13:32, 28 August 2011 (UTC) to create a time and date stamp. Create a new category if another team mate has already commented here.

Assign Task2
Look into motor control systems and voltage regulators to vary speed of motor and output of power supply.

Compare actual work done to Task2
Found a cheap but good motor that is widely available. A friend of mine has used this motor for a similar project he worked on and confirmed that it worked appropriately. It has a variable voltage capacity (9-18V), so all I need to do is now be able to vary the voltage of the circuit and the motor will respond accordingly with varied speed.

Week2 Narrative
The main problem this week was figuring out a way to vary the speed of the motors, and use this for steering. I have come up with a few different solutions to this problem, and deciding between them will begin the phase of the project where my work fuses with the work done on the radio control aspect of the project. The boat has to have a drive system, and it has to have a radio control system, and so somewhere in the middle those two have to meet to translate the users inputs into electrical signals which eventually turn into current which spins the motors with magnetic fields.

The solutions involve having a circuit consisting of a battery connected to a potentiometer (variable resistor) which in turn is connected to the motor and then back to the battery completing the circuit. The trick is going to be how to integrate the radio control aspect into the process. We could have the user control the resistance on the potentiometer which would vary the voltage across the motor, allowing a linear control of speed.

We can also do something along the lines of putting more batteries in the circuit and using relays of different turn-on voltages to connect them in parallel. This way if the control was something like a dial or stick which can be varied more than just on/off like a button, then the higher the controller goes the more batteries are allowed to join the circuit and power the motor.

We have plenty of ideas, the goal now is to figure out which is the most feasible to do with the types of RC controls we are working with.

Week2 Peer Review
Go to each team mates weekly summary wiki page. Read their activities and narrative. Then go the associated discussion page. Say something positive on this page. Try some constructive criticism. Add your name and 1sfoerster 13:32, 28 August 2011 (UTC) to create a time and date stamp. Create a new category if another team mate has already commented here.

Assign Task3
Look into types and costs of resistors in case I need to build my own potentiometer. Consider ways to introduce Radio control into circuits.

Compare actual work done to Task3
Have a plan for building the variable resistor setup, just need to do some testing to find out what range of resistance should be used.

Week3 Narrative
I have built a circuit with 3 resistors, a motor, and a power supply (on the boat will be a battery) which will allow us to have a 4 speed motor. After testing several different resistors with widely ranging resistance, I narrowed the operational window to between 1 and 10 ohms. Much higher than that and the motor does not start up. The only remaining step is to make the RC part be able to alternate between these resistors.

Week3 Peer Review
Go to each team mates weekly summary wiki page. Read their activities and narrative. Then go the associated discussion page. Say something positive on this page. Try some constructive criticism. Add your name and 1sfoerster 13:33, 28 August 2011 (UTC) to create a time and date stamp. Create a new category if another team mate has already commented here.

Assign Task4
Get together with current RC progress and unify efforts into functioning RC motor circuit.

Compare actual work done to Task4
Rationalize differences

Week4 Narrative
Upload photos to wikimedia. Upload video to youtube. Convert all spreadsheets, documents, and presentations to wiki format and create wiki subpage of your page for each of them. Link to them here in a narrative that tells a story. High light the problems (engineering problems) you had and how you solved them.

Week4 Peer Review
Go to each team mates weekly summary wiki page. Read their activities and narrative. Then go the associated discussion page. Say something positive on this page. Try some constructive criticism. Add your name and 1sfoerster 13:33, 28 August 2011 (UTC) to create a time and date stamp. Create a new category if another team mate has already commented here.

Complete Project Page
Follow the "project done" format.

Start Next Project Week0 activities
During this week you will perform the week0 activities of the next project.