David-Cabezas_SJSU Spartan Superway

Today, the team worked on building some of the track sections so we may better visualize what parts we still need and what kind of brackets and rails the switch sections of our track will need. In general, the team will need about 20 3D printed brackets for our new track. At the moment, the team has two straight sections, two curves, and one switch section built. The biggest progression to our project, however, was finalizing our track bender design. The main components worked on was how the system will be supported by u-shaped metal rails, attached to a wooden board through 'Z' and 'L' brackets. Two threaded rods will keep the bender connected to the track and with the help of the bottle jack, apply an axial force to the rails. Two 2x4 wooden blocks will hold up the wheels and a soft material will be placed at the end so when part of the rail slides between the supports, there would not too much grinding between the material. We will accomplish this using thin metal ...

Today, a guest speaker gave a presentation on transportation systems like BART and PRT. He argued that the only way personal rapid transportation could be competitive is for the small-scale team to showcase a professional model that would demonstrate the timing PRT will work under. The problem with this and our current situation with Spartan Superway is the funding allocated to small teams. Because of this, we will continue to build and design the track using aluminum rails and the modular design presented to us from last year's designed. The guest speaker also mentioned a new track design that would show how the PRT system will work between cities. To further elaborate, the track will have a general outer loop where the bogeys can traverse between cities and splits into smaller loops, called "offline stations", where the pod car moves into the specific "city" targeted where it can drop off the riders and recharge its battery (inductive charging in our case). ...

On the 6th of February, the team focused on organizing our new workplace on Terraine St. This came after the whole team helped Spartan Superway move from the old warehouse location. About 3/4 of our parts were stored in a room and we spent our time hauling the old material to our workplace. We realized, however, that some of our parts were missing and still are. We assume that they were taken in for scrap metal so we plan to re-fabricate those parts.  Apart from cleaning up the workplace, the team spent their time on two things. Brandon and I went ahead and laid out the track on the floor so we could get the general sense of the space it would be taken. Second, the team had to re-design the track bender since there were resources that were previously available to us before that aren't now.  For the following week, we plan on continuing to improve the track bender design and to work on rebuilding the previous track. We also hope to have outside access to the location bes...