tir38

The challenge
Design and build a machine that fires Nerf foam balls and hits static and moving targets with great accuracy and speed.

The team
Four engineers joined forces to accept the challenge.

Justin Farrell (firing), Melvin Rayappa (vision, coding), Jason Atwood (system integration), and Rachel Jackson (loading, aiming)

The machine

Figure 1. Depiction of overall mechatronic system with key components highlighted.

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I have a lot of USB devices which I’m continually plugging/unplugging from my Windows 7 machine. I wanted some custom icons to appear on the desktop when specific devices are plugged in. I hacked together a solution from several other people’s solutions around the web to put together a (hopefully) complete how-to:

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The year lasted longer than I expected. I was planning on not riding from September til now. Well gladly, that didn’t happen. Here’s a quick blast of what happened since August.

At the track, I finished very well at the third Pro Series Race. I technically finished the ominum in 6th place. However, the results don’t show how the rain screwed me out of 5th place. I had won entrance into the sprint final, where last place was still guaranteed one point. That would have bumped me into 5th place. Well five minutes before the race started, the rain came in and soaked my chances. Anyways, I stuck it to Marty later in the year!

Chris Kelly and I teamed up for the second Working Man’s Madison. We rode better than our first Madison. We held our own considering we were racing against the would-be National Champ.

Work obligations kept me from coming down most of the rest of the season. The one opportunity I had to make it down, I continued my Chariot race winning streak. I ended the year in 15th place overall out of 80+ racers. The highlight of the year was winning Team of the Year with Faster Mustache.

Team of the Year award. Photo Courtesy: Jon Woodroof | twotoneatl.com
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For the last ten months, I’ve been contracting as an electromechanical engineer at a research chemistry firm in Atlanta. They specialize in commercializing several patented processes and they have hired me to automate the processes for several applications. I have used this opportunity to refine and expand my electronics and process controls skill sets. They work with several Fortune 500 companies producing quick market solutions. In the interest of all of this privacy I am bound to a pretty strict confidentiality agreement. Unfortunately I can’t talk about details, however, I am working on some really cool projects so I’ll stick to the how’s and leave out the what-for’s. I’ll also refer to the company as XYZ to make this easier.

I had this really long post in the works and was completing it piece-meal as I had time. Sad to say though, I’ve been so busy doing work that I haven’t had time to write about work. So in the interest of brevity and to start a format where I can easily add new posts as I finish projects, I’m going to limit my writing and let some pictures do most of the talking.

I am spending a lot of time working with LabView and I have become quite efficient at writing programs and designing process control systems. One of our processes requires monitoring and controlling seven gas flows, monitoring the pressure in two liquid lines, monitoring the temperature in ten locations, and moving a two axis robot to various positions and repeating several paths. The program can also export all of this data to an Excel file of the user’s choosing.

The motion hardware at XYZ is antiquated ValueMotion driver and nuDrive amplifier hardware, which took me a bit of time to setup and get working properly. I’ve implemented both a mechanical and software emergency stop. The thermocouple and pressure transducer monitoring is accomplished with National Instrument’s FieldPoint modules, which while also legacy technology, are quite ubiquitous at XYZ.

I wrote a program that incorporated all of these features. I’ve removed any confidential information but here is a overview of the program and the necessary files.. I am in the process of upgrading all of XYZ’s Labview to LV2009 from the much older 7.1 (and even 5.0 on some machines). So this program is written in 7.1.

Front Panel

Block Diagram

LabVIEW 7.1 (files zipped)

The middle part of the season has been a busy one for me. I’ve competed in two major events at the velodrome and another three races on the road. I’ve very proud of my performances so far.

After the Keirin at Dick Lane Velodrome in May, a fellow rider Lucius Williams shot and edited an amazing video of the event. The first portion has several shots of me.

THE KEIRIN from Lfour on Vimeo.

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