Initial Track Design and Overview of Previous Week

This week our team noticed that there was a terrible communication issue because there were overlapping tasks and the teams have yet to confront each other. Thus, everybody (from the 1/12th scale) gathered to hold a meeting on how to maintain better communication and future plans. We all agreed that we will be holding weekly meetings at the beginning of each session and that all files will be shared in the 1/12th scale google drive that was set up. This way, it allows people to access the files they need at any time and it will be saved for future years. We also joined an app called ‘Slack’ which allows us to group chat more easily if we needed to ask something urgent since most of us do not instantly reply to Emails (which is different for our phones). After the meeting, our individual track improvement team talked about our plans for the coming weeks. The Gantt chart will need an update after confirmation this following week, but it appears that next week, we will be documenting measurements of the entire track due to the lack of documents and measurements found in the previous reports. And for the coming weeks after a long discussion we decided we will be redesigning the entire track so that we can create a workable design by the end of the semester. As for the other teams, they can use the working loop to test their equipment and addition. Our changes to the new track will not be absurdly different but the measurements will be more precise and smooth, hopefully. As of now, our blogs have been rather short due to the need to establish a proper foundation, but I believe that slowly our blogs will get more extensive and detailed.

The following figures show what we plan to do for improvements of the track.  We will look into changing the design of the bracket since the previous brackets lacked structural support and caused the guide way to slack at key parts of the track which is shown in figure 1. Figure 2 shows that the previous track design has some flaws in terms of making the track easier to manufacture, at least we think it would be easier.  Figure 3 shows how we plan to go about this.  Points A, B, C, and D will all be the same curvatures. Points F and E will also be the same.   We are aiming to basically have two parts built. Figure 4 shows how we plan to attach each loop together since we would want more than one loop.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4