Friday the 27th

We were supposed to be leaving the school at 18:00 hours on Friday the 27th. The locomotive still wasn't tested. From last post, most of the components were installed but nothing was turned on and no power was sent to the wheels. We stayed in the lab till 03:00 Friday morning but couldn't not get the components ready to run. We cam in at 08:00 hours that morning to run more tests and to get help with the circuit components. While Ivan and Hammed completed the circuits, everyone else was putting the last touches on the locomotive. One task in particular was the pressure regulator for the air compressor. The only way for it to be accessible was to install in on the bottom of the chassis. The compressor wasn't meant to be disassembled so the regulator wasn't mount friendly. So I found a piece of wood, bored out two holes to attached some T-nuts to it so it could be attached to the extruded aluminum chassis. Then, I used some wood screws to screw it into the wood. Worked perfectly. Anyone can complete a task with the right tools, instructions, and components. It takes an engineer to complete a task WITHOUT the right tools, instructions, and components.

I wasn't the only one doing work. Thursday, the aluminum body was made and painted. Friday, we spent time doing the final fittings, drilling hols for the bolts that were outside the designed area, and bolting in the mounting brackets used to connect it to the chassis.

Next, we realized that we didn't have enough time to finish the testing in the lab and we needed to get to the track. So we decided to pack up and head to Stapleford Miniature Railway.


We arrived at 22:00 hours and didn't have a working locomotive. As a whole, we ate some dinner, talked about a plan of attack to make the final connections and apply all the changes. Once we started working we realized another issue with a major component, the tachometer. The tacho was a key feature which was incorporated in every aspect of our design, from cruise control, torque and speed mode switching, applying regenerative braking, etc. We started work on it and found the problem, but at that time, a team around the corner decided to test their air compressed train horn which surprised us while we were soldering a component on the tacho. Needless to say, we couldn't use the tacho anymore. At this point in time we needed to redesign how our locomotive worked. We wen't back to fundamentals, not using the script I had spend dozens of hours on, not using half the circuitry Ivan built, but instead, using the basic features of the motor controller and relying more on the logic circuits built.

After we found out how to utilize the components we had, it was only a matter of time before we were up and running. Six hours later, we had it running. After several more hours of tweaking we had an operational locomotive. It became a fun day of competing.