26 Jul Colorado School of Mines, Week 7

It is now the end of week 7 here at the Colorado School of Mines where I am working in the RoSE Lab on the IPEx rover and this week was a lot of prep for CDR.

The full drivetrain connected together

Starting at the beginning of the week on Monday I was finishing work on the calculations for the battery and the life of the battery with the new brakes and shorted cycle length and found that the battery controlling the wheels would last 90 minutes and the battery controlling everything else would last over 2 hours which is much better than the previous 50 minutes. I also worked on my slides for the CDR (Critical Design Review) presentation this next week which is the where we prove that the project is going to work and we can continue the build. On Tuesday I started by going over the bill of materials was updated and had all the new components such as the buck converter needed for the strain gauges, the ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) so that the raspberry pi can read the signal from the strain gauges, and the last new component the relay to power the electromagnetic brakes when we want to move the arm. The rest of the day was filled with making custom longer wires and plugs to connect up all 4 motors for the wheels to the Teensy, by the end of the day on Tuesday we were able to get all 4 of the drivetrain motors to spin and in the correct direction.

The updated Avionics Architecture for IPEx

The new updated Wire Diagram for IPEx

On Wednesday I began to update the avionics diagrams because new components needed to be added. There also was the idea Hayden proposed to instead of connecting the electronics up to the motor controllers directly but to instead use a protoboard to make it so that the wires weren’t all in one place and things were easier to access and take apart, along with that Philip who was working on the software was able to get the drivetrain motors to be controlled with keyboard keys to go forward, backward, and turn. The rest of the day Wednesday was focused on our meeting about the next steps of each subsystem and about the up coming CDR presentation. The last days this week Thursday and Friday I  spent completely updating the wire diagram and the avionics architecture diorama with the new components along with the components that changed. I seen a long time reorganizing the wiring diagram and also though I would wire it so that the numerous wires that are going to be connected to the Teensy micro controllers was better organized and the connections that would be connected were better distributed among the two we had.

Walking around at Meow Wolf Denver

Outside of the lab this week I continue to take bakeries in the area usually on my favorite loop to the north side of golden and then ack home again. I have also been continuing my flight training and have really pushed my skills during emergencies and during abnormal landings. I also went to the Denver Meow Wolf which was an unreal experience, it was super fun walking around solving puzzles that you had to find. I am super exited to see what my last week here at the Colorado School of Mines brings.