Electric Longboard Weekly Log
February 12th
This week we finalized our project idea for an electric longboard. We decided what pieces we were going to buy and which ones we would make, in addition to producing a timeline and Gantt chart for our project proposal. Also, we needed to create wiki accounts which ended up being more of a pain than we realized. Once we had created our accounts we were able to learn how to create a wiki page and format it to our liking.
- till next week...
February 19th
For the past month we have been thinking about this electric longboard intently. We had a dream of making a remote that corresponded to the opening and closing of the rider's hand using a flex sensor and wirelessly relaying the information to the arduino board and engine. This week we found out our project was a bit too ambitious and was not going to work. A crushing blow to our spirits, self esteem and confidence, but soon we realized this is a part of engineering. Nobody said this would be easy so we are ready for the challenge! Bring it! After a long talk we discovered it would be too risky financially and physically in the time frame that we have. As a result we have been brainstorming new project ideas, and scaled down versions of the electric longboard. After many brainstorming sessions and one very productive meeting with Alden we have decided to make an electric longboard without a motor, that focuses more on gadgetry and enhancing the riding experience. We hope to figure out how to measure the speed of the longboard, position, and direction of its motion while adding headlights for a safer night riding experience. (but don't forget to wear a helmet!) At the moment we are thinking of using a raspberry pi (not for eating) to create a self sustained circuit that will be confined to the board. We want it to be able to intake data from a gps chip and convert it to a distance traveled, add a reed switch circuit to measure how many times the wheel spins(how fast we are going), and make headlights and potentially back lights which will switch on and off based on direction of motion. At the moment we are nailing down our project proposal and hope to have a very concrete idea of what we are doing by the end of the weekend.
March 10th
After our meeting we determined a number of things:
The magnets are not going to work for the encoder, and we are going to print an encoder instead.
Our GPS chip is on the cheaper side, but hopefully it is enough to determine or velocity vector, therefore distance traveled. We can write a filter circuit to clean out drastic changes in location and instead just use vector lengths.
Our headlights are going to be the last step assuming we get out GPS and encoder working.
We have purchased our GPS chip and Raspberry Pi so that we can start working on the coding and circuitry immediately after break.
Also, we cleaned the longboard so its ready for test runs once the circuit is built.
Our next step is going to be printing the encoder and setting up the code to determine speed and direction.
We're also going to need to become more familiar with linux and Ubuntu coding language so we can utilize the raspberry pi as soon as it comes in. The Raspberry PI runs linux on it out of the box meaning we can download an image onto a hard rive so we can run it through our computers.
March 25th
The week after spring break has been exciting largely due to the fact that we finally got our materials!
Now that we have our raspberry pi and gps chip we are able to really start cracking down on production.
We have set up rasbian and started writing some code for the GPS, but it has not been working thus far.
Currently the goal is to familiarize ourselves with GPS coding standard, finalize our GPS code, and start taking some tests.
Next on our plate is ordering the LED's and light sensors for the encoder, and 3D printing an encoder for the wheel.
We are still unsure how to use the 3D printer so that will probably be the focus of the ext week or so.
