Week 26 - lglik/Portfolio GitHub Wiki

03/04/19 - 03/08/19

Day One:

Continued to work or redoing wiring for the battery system. I learned how to add a piece for the large connectors on the batteries that looks like it should be crimped, but instead, the stripped wire is inserted and the entire thing is filled with solder. I was able to get maybe half of the connections between the batteries and the relays done. I learned how to remove wires from the large connectors and installed more connectors so that each battery connects to the system separately.

Day Two:

I finished making the wires that will go between each battery to a relay. All of the rest of the wring that needs to be done is more complicated in that it will not simply be one wire going between two locations, but three or more relays or devices that need to be connected to each other. I worked with Mr. Harlow to figure out how to do this. We decided on using lug-nuts to make three-way connections. I'm waiting on conductive grease to screw the lug nuts together and continued stripping wires and crimping connectors to them in the meantime.

The connector crimped to the ends of three wires to connect them using a fastener and a nut.

Day Three:

Today I finished crimping on the connectors to the end of the six wires. They were connected as two groups of three. In each case, there were two batteries that went to one lead which was the load for the project. I first connected the wires to each other loosely to make sure all the lengths were right and to figure out what angles to have between the wires. Then, once all the wires were carefully lined up. I put a small amount of conductive grease between each lead and then fastened the whole thing tightly. I also put shrink wrap over the whole junction. Because the large and awkwardly shaped connection, I had to use multiple pieces of shrink wrap and cut some shrink wrap into specific shapes. Once I had installed these wires, I was then finished with all of the power wires the battery charging system.

Day Four:

The magnetic dancing trees project has been under construction for almost a year at this point. Recently, other students have been working on fitting pieces of acrylic to close up the project and make it sealed, but for the vast majority of the year, the project had been sitting in the open by the doorway to the room. The whole project was covered in quite a bit of dust and debris so I thought I would take advantage of the missing wires and removed batteries to clean the project. I had some students help me move the project to the back patio of the machine shop where I used compressed air to blow off the dust. I also worked for a bit on making the wiring for the pi and I2C devices nicer. I also started to think about how to do the wiring for the ground and signal wires

The dust and debris on a part of the project before it was cleaned.

Day Five:

I decided to work on the signal wires next. With the old design, the signal wires did not all come from the same port since there were a bunch of different control signals used. With my design, there only needs to be one signal which is either on or off. I talked with Mr. Harlow about whether it would be better to move all the wires to the same port or keep it as it is and just modify the code, and he said that it would be fine to keep the wires the same. I did change which signal wires were plugged in where because the wires are different lengths and going to different locations. This was pretty quick so I also started to think about how to make the ground wires for the project and considered attaching all the grounds to an aluminum strip to connect them.