Must see blog posts – Jetha's Graduation Project

It was extremely difficult setting this up at home as while I made sure to have spare components and wires. I didn’t have equipment like a multimeter, soldering iron, programmable dc supply to debug circuits. I had 2 plugs fail on me so I had to plug 2 circuits into my computer which made it hard to make sure the circuits all turned on at the same time. Due it to being a bank holiday weekend also I couldn’t go to uni replace the plugs.

Luckily everything pretty much worked except for the solenoids in user control and one of the servos in time compressed processes. However these are very common problems, throughout this project I’ve had servos fail and the solenoids have been very temperamental. I’m sure there were issues with voltage drop and current draw, this was unavoidable I triple checked and tested the circuits before bringing them home.

In the video it looks like the servos driving the rack and pinions aren’t working. That was not the case they were working but the way that the servos and circuits were fixed in place the servos the rack and pinions didn’t move. Also the cardboard adding extra space between the gear and servo, the screws ended up not gripping onto the gear like they were before. I tried adding hot glue to the screws to hold it to the gears but it didn’t make much difference. Fortunately I do have videos of the user control circuit and mechanisms working.

The mounting for the hardware symbolisation wasn’t exactly as planned but with what I had it is very close. I had the mirror and all the hardware I wanted to display just not the mounting in between that allows you to see the underside.

Also the arrangement is not to scale. The pieces are to scale none of the components or circuits are a prototype. I just don’t have a large enough space to create the walkable layout I planned for.

Overall though the demonstration was a success as the majority of the piece was working as it should.