Week 20 - ngetachew/Portfolio GitHub Wiki

This week, my group and I focused on fixing the solenoid. When we turned the solenoid to its 'ON' position, or turned on the magnet to move it up, the solenoid would sometimes get stuck after the magnet was turned off. Initially, my group thought this was a small error, and we simply sanded the shaft's chamfer thinking that the friction between it and the rest of the indeffector had somehow increased. However, it was still getting stuck. Initially, we thought that this was because the shaft's position with respect to the collet had changed, so we spent a considerable amount of time adjusting its height. However We also tried to fix it by using a heavier collet so that it would have more weight pushing it down, but this didn't work either. We eventually resorted to profiling the chamfer on the shaft so that it could fit more length in the solenoid. This allowed it to be raised further away from the game piece and drop it when necessary. We tested it using the Adafruit code, and it worked semi-consistently, which is better than before. However, while we were testing, the solenoid got extremely hot. This was because its getting 24 volts instead of 12. While this is fine because we only have it on for moments at a time, in the long run, this might pose a problem, so one of our mentors helped us decrease the voltage.