At this stage two final designs needed to be created for final testing. These two new designs are elaborated and altered versions the sketches that were created in lab 1. One of the prototypes was a propeller powered monorail. This idea was a modified version of the original example monorail from lab 1. The changes made were the placements of the part holding the wheels as well as the the position of the Arduino, these changes were made because originally the cart was no balanced and leaned backwards messing up the code. The new set up made the piece holding the wheels towards the front and moved the Arduino to the back of the cart. The new set up is shown in the picture below.

The second design that was made was a motorized wheel design. This design created two new parts, one which was a new piece to hold the wheels but also would hold the motor to be able to connect it to the wheel. The other part was a new wheel this wheel is similar to the original wheel with just a smaller center hole so it would be able to perfectly fit on the motor and also was created slightly deeper to be able to add traction and then still be the same depth as the original wheel. The wheel design is shown in the picture below.

By the end of the lab the design that was chosen to move on for further testing is the motorized wheel design. It was found the wheel design only used 3.8 watts of power while the propeller model used 19 watts making the motorized wheel five times more efficient than the propeller. Since efficiency is a priority because of the limited access to energy it was clear that the motorized wheel design was the best choice.

The AEV that will be build is one that can follow the track at a proper speed, it also has to come into play that since it is going yo carry passengers to various parts of the park it needs to be programmed to stop at the various spots and give time to allow for passengers to get off. For this lab two codes were created to run through the park, on of the codes was created using mostly the celerate command with at least one MotorSpeed command. While the second code had to be made using mostly MotorSpeed code. This lab took a lot of trial and error for the first code that was created since it was using the celerate code it was measured in seconds so it took discussion comparing as a group after a test that was not perfect what exactly needed to be changed because you were dealing with time and also having to vary the power input for the motors.

After all the tests were done a Matlab code was created to find efficiency of the codes and various information collected while the AEV was running through the path. With the Matlab code the graphs  of power vs. time, power vs. distance, velocity vs. distance, kinetic energy vs. distance, and propulsion efficiency vs. distance. This information will be used for future reference in creating the final designs to make the most efficient version.

A main requirement given for the designs by the national park is that it needs to be energy efficient. With the energy supply being limited in the park the study of efficiency had to be done to find the most efficient way to power the designs. A common for of power is wind power through the use of propellers. The goal is to determine the efficiency the propulsion system by setting the input power supplied to the motor, and measuring the power output from the electric motor and the propeller using a thrust stand. The wind tunnel and the different propellers that could be used for the design is what was used for this lab. A type pushed or puller direction was given in terms of the placement of the propeller in the wind tunnel. Then propeller was put in the wind tunnel and the percent power was continuously increased then the current was logged based on the indicator. After the current was taken down the thrust and RPM was calculated and used to graph against the given data to find the percent error in the data.

From all of this data the results of all the propellers were compared to each other to find the most efficient one to use of the further designs. The type EP- 3030 was decided as the ideal propeller and the one that will be used on the further tests and labs.

The process of lab 4 was to gain familiarity with the wheel sensors. A way to track the distance the AEV has traveled is to use a sensor that counts how many ticks the wheel has made. One revolution of the wheel makes 8 ticks and then it was also known that one revolution of the wheel is 3.9 inches. This information would be used to program the AEV for later code in the lab, but for the first part of the lab the code was given. This lab is to just demonstrate the use of the sensors and get familiar with how the AEV moves and stops while using the various codes that use distance.

Once the initial code was run and observed a code was created that ran on the flat part of the monorail track. This code was to practice writing the code using the new commands that use the sensor. The code is written in terms of tick marks collected by the sensor. A picture of the code created is listed below as well as a picture of the sensors used for the AEV.

In this lab two tasks were completed. Since the Park requires that one of the designs needs to be a monorail the monorail design given as a prototype used in Lab 1 and Lab 2 was used again to continue the practice of coding the cart and getting more familiar with how the monorail moves at certain speeds and power. Then the second part of the lab is the majority of the vital work in moving forward with the project.

A Concept Screening Sheet and Concept Scoring Matrix was created to compared and score the three designs made in Lab 1. First a list of criteria was made to judge the three designs the list consisted of difficulty to build, software complexity, cost, environment impact, and appearance. In the first chart is the Concept Screening Sheet the is a process that uses -1, 0, and 1 to score with -1 being not good 0 being equal to the reference and 1 being good. The full chart is shown below. The second chart used was Concept Scoring sheet which  is calculated using a weighted score for each criteria. Then each design was given a score of 1-5 then calculated a final weighted score. After the completion of both charts the monorail scored the highest to create both times.

Well made software is just as vital to any computerized projects as hardware. The quality of the software can impact everything from customer comfort to energy efficiency and the speed at which components break. In order to get the railcar to move in the desired way, the programming of the Arduino could be completely made of simple commands.  Some of these basic commands include acceleration and braking motors. Simple motor commands were loaded onto the Arduino in order to give an example on how the software would have to be designed in order for the railcar to work effectively. The goal is to discover and be able to create a ideal car to comfortably and efficiently transport people one place of the park to another. Part of being able to obtain this is by developing a code to make the car move and stop at a subtle and relaxed way without causing the passengers discomfort. To accomplish this the practice of working with coding and programming was practiced.

In this lab the prototype design for the monorail was being used and it was found that the weight distribution was off balanced, so it became known moving forward that we needed to alter the setup of the AEV and work on finding a way to get all of the parts we needed on the cart with it also being level. With a few modifications made to the AEV an altered prototype was made to continue to test the code with. The new style created gave ideas of how to set up our ideas for a new design for the AEV.