My Final Blog Post as a Summer Intern at Spartan Superway

 During this week and the last week, I have been working on the final project for the bogie team. I reread all of the material we used, our presentations and our notes to decide what information to include and what information not to include in the report. After completing the first draft of the report, I began rereading the report multiple time to check if I forgot any material that should have been added. I also reread the report to check for any spelling or grammar errors before sending it to my manager. After I sent off the report, I was put in charge of communicating with the suspension team, the small scale track team, and the small scale electronic team. Since these teams leave this week I needed to talk to each team to figure out and understand what needed to be done after they left. I mostly talked about the fabrication process with these teams, since they completed their design, but didn't have enough time to put their design into reality. The reason I had to do this was to be able to pick up where they left off, or to transmit the knowledge of where they left off to the next group of students that work on the project.

My overall experience at the Spartan Superway was amazing. This internship showed and taught me how to work with multiple groups and how to communicated amongst the many groups in a project. It taught me how to communicate efficiently with different types of people. For instance, when you are communicating with group members about information pertaining to the project, you may communicate to an extroverted person differently than how you communicate with an introverted individual. I enjoyed working with the people in my bogie team, for most of us communicated amongst eachother well and we all had good work ethic. I realized that not everyone may not have the strongest work ethic, but to not let that interfere with your individual work and your team's work. I learned you have to help motivate these individuals or talk with them about include them into your portion of work and work together with them.

I gained additional knowledge on how to use Solidworks more efficiently throughout this internship. I learned about many different systems and mechanism from researching roller coasters, buses, trains, and gandolas and brainstorming. I also learned a lot from these systems of transportation when trying to implement a similar mechanism or design that these systems had onto our bogie. Researching and working with the motor we had in the Spartan Superway facility taught me how motors work, especially hub motors.

Blog update for week 7/18-7/22

During the last week, I worked mostly on preparing the fabrication and the fabrication of the bogie. I grinned down more welds on scrap metal to get the metal pieces ready to give to the machinist. I tried drilling and tapping a few holes in these metal pieces, but due to the equipment this wasn't as precise as we hoped for. This is why we decided to get all the fabrication of the metal pieces for the machinist to do, besides supplying him with the metal. The time I didn't spend on the fabrication of the bogie this week was spent on writing the final report for the bogie team. I reviewed all of our presentations and notes to decide what to include and what not to include in the final report. I found or captured pictures to help describe what I would include in the report.

Week of 7/11 - 7/15

On Monday, I made a few finishing touches for the conference poster. I also worked with Neto on the presentation that we gave at the conference. On Tuesday, I attended the conference and gave my presentation with Neto. I worked solely on the fabrication of the bogie for the remanding of the week. I was able to find some scrapped 1" by 1" tubes of steel that we needed, but they were welded onto other pieces of steel. So, I used a grinder to grind off the welds, and then used a butcher saw to cut the remanding welds that I couldn't get to with the grinder. I then filed down any sharp points on the metal tub and any metal that was hanging off. Neto and I began drilling holes into the tubes, but to get more precise holes we decided to plan on doing the drilling at the lab on campus,

ASES solar conference

While attending the the ASES solar conference yesterday(7-13-16), I learned a lot about solar panels in general, but especially about mounting systems. I enjoyed attending the conference as a whole The main three companies that I talked with were Baja Construction CO. INC., Alion Energy, and Japan Solar. The company I found most interesting and most beneficial for our project was Alion Energy because they have a robot that is programmed not only to help with the installation process, but also to clean the solar panels routinely. This idea would be ideal to implement on our project to reduce manual labor costs on both installation and cleaning. After networking with companies, I and a few individuals had to give our presentations. I believe everyone did a superb job on our presentations.

Weekly blog for 7/4-7/8

This week I worked mostly on the design of the bogie and especially the propulsion system. I brainstormed with my group members to figure out, which propulsion system to use on our final bogie. I designed a propulsion system on Solidworks and analyzed it with Victor's design of a propulsion system. After we brainstormed about each others designs, we put the completed design onto our bogie. Neto and I also began the fabrication process of the bogie.

Week of 6/27-7/1

During this week, I began to go more into depth involving the brainstorming of the propulsion system. I work with Victor and Pedro to decide which mechanism would be more efficient. After we ruled out a few different mechanism, we decided to pick 2 that we would stick with and design. I worked with Pedro in designing these propulsion systems on SolidWorks. I also helped Neto brainstorm on how to solve different issues involving our design and implementing the steering arms into the design.

Persona Blog for the week of 6/20-6/24

 During this week I researched more about propulsion systems and fail safe mechanisms. I began to brainstorm and sketch out a few ways to implement these systems or mechanisms. For the fail safe mechanism, I sketched how a mechanism that is used in roller coasters, the watchdog fail safe, could be implemented onto our track. This watchdog mechanism would involve a decent amount of electronics and programming. I sketched another fail safe mechanism that didn't use any electronics, which would build a protective frame around the track that would be connected to the bogie. I also helped work with Chon, the master student, on trouble shooting the circuitry and electrical components that are involved with the motor. For example a 12 bit DAC, a relay and the wiring configurations of the controller to the circuit boards and to the motor. After we were sure all wire connections were correct and all components were working, we began writing a program to test how the motor would respond to the Arduino. At first, we got the motor to constantly spin at a slow speed from the Arduino. Since we knew the Arduino was working properly and sending the correct signals to the motor, then we began to right a more detailed code that would change speeds and change directions.

Weekly Blog of 6/05 - 6/10

 This week went well involving the progress made on the bogie team. The team figured out different problems pertaining to the fabrication of the track and the bogie. I enjoyed doing a decent amount of hands on work involving fixing these fabrications, such as; grinding down welds, cutting metal shafts to a desired length and putting/taking apart the bogie. There has been some electrical issues involving the circuits in the back of the shop that were causing some issues, but after some troubleshooting it was resolved. I like how my group is working with each other involving the different sub-teams that we have split up in. I also enjoy the other groups help, for they always have an answer for my questions and help me understand what they are working on.

Hi I'm Michael Cahill

Hello, my name is Michael Cahill. I am going into my 4th year as a mechanical engineering student at SJSU. I was born and raised in San Diego and moved to San Jose because of the engineering program they have at SJSU. My favorite past time activities/or interests are taking apart anything I can and putting it back together/fixing it, playing rugby(been on the SJSU rugby team for 3 years now), listening to music/collecting records(all music, but especially the oldies), skateboarding, fishing and traveling.
 I had the opportunity to help the previous Spartan Superway Team at the ending of their trial. This consisted of observing and helping the track team on the final procedures they went through. I also had the opportunity to attend the Maker Faire, where I helped the team set up and take down their project.