Individual Blog Week 8 (7/17 - 7/21)

During this week, we were able to get one of the bogies completely working on the benchtop. After completing the ANSYS Fluent training, I was able to get back to working on the bogie. We are considering having an extra conditional variable that dictates the state of the bogie. For example, forward motion would be "0", reverse would be "1", steering right to left as "2", and steering left to right as "3". These variables would allow the program to be free of delays. One advantage to this type of movement is that we would not have to time the bogie running through specific portions of the track. However, because this has not been tested and we have been set on utilizing delays, there is a small chance that we will try to implement this.

Figure 1 shows the gist of how this will go through the program without using delays. As shown below, the directions variable is set to 3 when a magnet is detected, and the modulo two of the counting variable is 0. This makes it so the bogie stops moving. After completing the switch, the directions variable is set to 0. This allows the bogie to move forward. The same is done for the right to left switch, but with the directions variable controlling the reverse motion. 

Figure 1: An example of utilizing states.

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