Jeremy Lim's contribution to the project

For this project I was responsible for providing the materials for the project such as the base truck, arm and other extra parts that were not included in the final design. I created the first model of the design with cardboard which became the foundation for the dimensions of the truck bed, circular mount and servo mounts. I also created the servo bracket and servo motor on solid works that Paul used to create the final motion analysis. In addition I contributed to the blog, posting some of the weekly updates and helping with the pictures and videos. I also wrote the majority of the paper that summarized the project.

Paul D'Orlando's Contribution to the Project

For this project I put in a lot of time and effort in the designing and development of Mater the Tow Truck. I was involved with trying to figure out how to incorporate a tow truck assembly onto the back of a toy truck. I presented my ideas for how to make the assembly work, which included how it was going to be mounted and how it was going to function and move, and provided initial sketches of the idea. We collaborated on the final choices for the bed mount, the circular mount, and the servo brackets. I was majorly responsible for the creation of the bed mount and the circular mount in Solidworks and submitting all of the parts including the servo brackets for them to be made. I also was responsible for running the motion analysis for the final assembly in Solidworks. I assembled a majority of the parts of the assembly onto the truck and made sure they fit properly. I assisted with the creation of the blog, including making videos, taking pictures, and helping write the blog posts. Additionally, I was involved with making sure deadlines were met. I was also involved in writing the paper that summarized the project.

Chris Mirageas' Contribution to the Project

For this design project, I contributed a huge portion of time into the design and development of Mater the Tow Truck. I was involved in coming up with the initial ideas for choosing to integrate a tow truck arm into a toy truck. Once this was established I also came up with ideas for how to go about making this project come to life, including design of the truck bed cover, circular mount, and placement of all the servo motors. I was solely responsible for all Arduino activities, including writing all of the code, wiring the truck up, neatening the wires, and making sure all the electrical components functioned as intended. I also participated in creating the engineering drawings shown in previous posts on this blog. I also participated in creating the Solidworks models, assembly and motion analysis, and assembly of actual tow truck. I also maintained blog activities, including pictures, posts, creating Youtube videos, and uploading codes through Github, and played a role in making sure project deadlines were met.

Final Project Post

We have successfully completed the building of our tow truck. We just wrapped up the assembly and final testing before the presentation on Friday. We are very excited that our project works as planned with minimal adjustments, and that it picks up and moves small objects into our designated drop bin.

The following are pictures of the final assembly and projects as well as a video of what Mater does.

The final Arduino code for the motion is also posted.

Here is the final Gist: Our final assembly consists of three servo motors, two controlled by potentiometers and one controlled by a push button. The two potentiometers control the rotation of the whole assembly, and the push button controls the winch. The parts we used consisted of two laser cut pieces that we designed and had fabricated for the assembly. These include the truck bed cover, and the circular mount. We also designed two 3D printed servo brackets to hold down the servos that are mounted on the circular mount. We used a 15 hole Lego beam for our tow arm. A string and paper clip was also used to construct the hook attached to the winch. The Arduino board is mounted to the top of the truck. Overall, we feel that this project was a great success. We stuck with our original idea of turning a regular toy truck into a tow truck, and made it a reality. We feel that this project works really well for what we have. It does exactly what it was designed to; allow the user to utilize the remote control to pick up and move small objects easily. The only issue we ran into when building our project, was that the tolerance was off very little on some of the manufactured pieces, but was nothing a little filing could not fix to make it work. If we were to add one more thing, it could be a groove for the winch cable to ride on, but it is not necessary. Overall, the project was a success and we are happy with it.

Week of December 2nd

This week we have received all of our parts that were sent to be fabricated (laser cut and 3-d printed). The final assembly has begun. We have put all the parts together as well as finished all of the programming. All that is left to be done is to wire and mount the breadboard to the servo motors, as well as mounting the breadboards to the truck.

Week of November 25th

This week our group is working on an Arduino program that can control a servo motor with a push button making it rotate clockwise on one click and counterclockwise on two clicks. This will allow the tow hitch move up and down. In addition we have emailed all of our parts for fabrication. The servo bracket is to be 3D printed. The truck bed cover and circular base are to be laser cut.

Week of November 18th Summary

This week, Chris, Paul and, Jeremy met on Tuesday the 19th, Wednesday the 20th, and Thursday the 21st in lab. All of worked on the project 11 hours in total this week. We accomplished as a team figuring out the parts we needed to fabricate for this project by taking dimensions from our toy truck. We then designed all of the parts we needed on SolidWorks creating 3D models and drawings, and we created a test assembly of our crane mechanism with a moving motion analysis. All of these can be found in the following blog posts. Not much work was done on the Arduino code this week however, because most of it is complete, we will be finalizing the code and posting it to the blog next week.

The project is going very well, our goals from last week have been met, and our plan is exactly the same as it was set to be, and we feel our project will be a success.

Goals Set For Next Week:

1. The parts will be submitted for fabrication next week, since our solid models are complete.
2. A more fine tuned Arduino code will be completed including the final servo and push button, along with our LED Screen.