Group 13 Magnetic Path Controllers

This week we finished up our final project and recorded a video of it functioning. It worked relatively well, the ball was able to move in a circular trajectory, albeit very very slowly. We assembled an hour and a half of video footage of the ball moving through the gel and plan to put it together and speed it up so that the path the ball takes is visible. In addition, we are putting together a final presentation for Monday. Photo of the functioning final product

This week we completed our setup and started testing the functionality. We struggled a bit with the fine tuning of the magnet placement. The ball would either move imperceptibly slow or way too quickly. We plan to meet again this week the finalize a position for the magnet, clean up the setup as a whole and record a video of the machine working.

This week we decided to remove the Arduino from our project and replace it with a raspberry pi. We tried to run the code from the raspberry pi itself, but we had issues with getting the code to run at the desired speed due to the limited processing power. So we made a script to spin the motor that lives on the raspberry pi and we are using sending ssh commands to the pi from the imaging processing script running on an external computer. Next, we made a stand for the camera to sit on our platform. Now we just have to get our dish holder printed and make a case for the raspberry pi and the motor so the exposed circuitry is cut down. Next week we hope to run tests.

Week Six This week we were able to get a python program to start the spinning of the motor, but we are having a real issue getting the motor to stop spinning. We are using the Serial module for python and sending bytes to the Arduino board. In addition, we are making more gels and testing the magnetic pull force.

Week Five This week we were able to attach our 3d printed dish holder to the stepper motor. In addition, we started testing the gels to get some data on how the magnets interact in the gel. We recorded the test runs with a ruler to allow for after the fact calculations to be done like calculating acceleration as a function of distance from the external magnet. Large Dish Holder We also received our other 3d printed parts: the magnet and the small dish holder. They each fit the part well and will allow us to start our testing of the software.  Magnet Holder Smaller Dish Holder The programming code of the 28BYJ-48 stepper motor is almost complete. We are able to control the RPM of the motor but the highest amount we can set it to is around 20 rpm. If we set it to a speed higher than 20 rpm the motor will not spin the attached dish holder.

Week 4 This week we started printing our structures out. We printed a holder for the dish which will fit onto the bottom. (As seen in figures 1 and 2), and a holder for the external magnet as seen in figure 3. We had a chance to test the dish holder and it fit perfectly. We are still waiting for the magnet holder to print. Figure 1 (Top View) Figure 2 (Bottom View) Figure 3 In addition, we added a new option to the software. The option to graphically set the circular path that the magnet will go on by just clicking a point. We are still working out the bugs on this feature though. We were also able to get the stepper motor to run at it's highest speed, we now just need to work on sending commands from the python code. We were informed that we may have to switch to a smaller dish. We are going to make a few gel samples and test it to see how the magnet reacts in each dish.