The figure above shows the overall budget for the AEV at the end of the final performance test. This includes the cost of all the parts, the time of the run, the energy consumption, and the error costs. In the end, there were some errors that caused Group P to be over budget, but the efficiency in energy consumption set Group P back on track a little bit.
The overall cost of the system was $536,123.16. This was slightly over budget because there were some errors, but without the errors, the system would almost be on budget. In order to reduce the cost of the AEV, we incorporated a while loop because it saved about 50 Joules of energy overall. We also made a simple design with no extra pieces to reduce the overall cost. The one thing that could have been conserved more was time, but by the time we finished our code for final performance testing, we just had to go with it rather than fix it to make it faster because time was up.
After a lot of troubleshooting and testing new codes, the new method using while loops proved to be the most consistent. The code worked about 70% of the time for the final performance test code, and it used only about 80% as much energy as the other codes. The graphs above show how the code gives the AEV short bursts of power then it is followed by a period of braking where it can conserve energy while still moving along the track.
