$200 Phalanx

01/04/2019

This was the final for FSE 100 - Intro to Engineering. The project had to be fully autonomous with at least one sensor and actuator. The youtube link explains the mechanical assembly and the basics of how it works. It does not cover the mistakes that were made and what I learned.

Mistakes and what I learned:

Not planning ahead with the power source and motors created many issues. We did not calculate power needs for what batteries, drivers, or motors we would actually need to move the gun. As a result, the project became more expensive, exceeding our original budget as we were forced to use Li-Po batteries, drivers, motors with a stronger stall torque, and weights to move the center of gravity of the gun.
I learned the importance of comments on code. As different people added and deleted parts of code the comments became crucial in order to understand what the other group members were doing. Once we communicated to each other what the functions of different lines of code were, we discovered the solution to our motion tracking problem.
Not including a Margin of Safety for our project left little room for error and again forced us to change our parts list. Not accounting for frictional forces in our original design idea was a mistake and we were later forced to add the turntable.

Accomplishments to take note of:

Project planning, time management, and communication. From the very beginning each group member was on board with the deadlines and collaborated to create a Gantt Chart we could and did follow. A significant portion of time was allocated to troubleshooting. Because of this, despite our previous mistakes, we were able to make adjustments and finish the project before the deadline.
During our prototype testing we made sure to test in many different scenarios. We tested with different colors of objects, under different lighting conditions, and with different times of tracking. Because of this, we were able to optimize the test and the turret worked correctly on multiple occasions. This includes in class and at Raytheon's Missiles in Movies presentation.