Hello and welcome to the last actual week of my project DTSF. This week was the most intense because between the presentation and just the fact that working on these projects over the semester is going to be impossible.
I learned this week that electromagnets can get hot enough to melt plastic, specifically hot enough to melt PLA, the plastic I’ve been printing all my parts out of. This has only happened now because the magnet has only been on for short bursts until this week with all the testing I’ve been doing. I reprinted the piece holding the magnet with a different plastic, PETG, which should be comfortable with the magnet’s temperatures. After that, it turned out that thanks to how they behave at different temperatures my PLA parts did not move with my PETG parts. After reprinting some more of the PLA parts and some sanding down and lubrication of a sliding part, everything was working again.
I spent most of the week calibrating the movement of the assembly. We took apart the base several times this week, in an attempt to add some balance to it. This whole part has been quite annoying because I keep running into lots of little bugs. A lot of the time, the code is just not behaving the same way from test to test. The magnet was also quite selfish, only working part of the time, mostly because of a grounding issue. The magnet also melted the PLA, but that was fixed by printing a part in PETG.
This part of the project has been exhausting. I barely have anytime left and I’m scrambling to get a lot less than I what had planned done. Everyday something breaks. Seriously, I am not exaggerating, something always breaks on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s just that the Arduino or my PC need to be restarted. Other times, I or someone else notice something that is breaking down or will soon enough and I have to take an hour or two to fix it. Other times, it’s something really bizarre that takes the whole day to sort out. A good example is when my relay for the electromagnet stopped working, it would give power to the magnet but the magnet stopped taking it. Or kept taking it as sometimes the magnet would just keep sticking long after having power directly cut off. After testing out different relays, breadboards, checking everything worked with a multimeter, we found that the magnet worked when touching something conductive. It turned out the wire completing the circuit had died.
I don’t have any major regrets about the project and I feel like I’ve done a lot and learned a lot, but it’s just tiring at this point. See you in the reflection post.
