Final Project

For motivation and rough thoughts on how the project should be developed, please refer to final project proposal

So in order to make a spoiler that can expand, rotates and change its shape (too much work obviously), three major systems needs to be developed, i.e. the wings part, the moving mechanism, and control system.

Wing Part

Wing part is tricky. It is not that complicated to just make something that moves. Yet for a functional spoiler, potentially and useful one, it will require structure rigidity, flexibility, and not inducing tension during operation which is another way of creating material failure.

The proposal here is to make individual "slideable" wing parts that are connected but not restrained, as shown below:

With a minimun of two parts:

And they can change the wing-span as much as 100%, as shown here:

wing expanding from Rui Qing on Vimeo.

What is not shown here is the wires, potentially high strength steel ones in real action, that are flexible and strong enough to sustain the whole weight of the spoiler as well as the huge downforce at high speed while providing enough flexibility. ANd connectors are not taking the weight part.

Moving mechanism

My best anticipation for the moving mechanism for the wings is x-y stage on the side. Yet again it is too much work within such a tight time frame. So here I go for an easy one which is just stepper motor with rail and track to guide the movement of the wings (together with the wires).

Here is the design of the side panel. The inner curve does shape weirdly as I need to ensure that that its spacing to the out ellipse is constant on a ray starting from the center of the ellipse.

To guide the movement on the side I made a center shaft with rails and a small head that helps holding the wire and slide against the rail.

Commercial gears are used to connect the shaft and the stepper motorGears. Assembled they look like this.

Control System

The control of the motors are nothing but a serial connected control board with two motor driver unit. The control board and stepper motor controller, which is much like Neil's design, are shown here.

Controller:

Stepper Motor Driver:

In Controller board, I create two "mock buttons" and program it to function as switches so that motor can perform reverse actions with it being high or low state. Not that challenging.

Yet the challenging part is to avoid accidental destruction. With the working motor controller fried and remake once (actual board more than this), corner of the conference table in 023 prevent me from presenting a working prototype by tearing off the power pin in one of my stepper motor board and serial pin in another, at noon of the presentation day, which even leaves me no time to remake.

Guess it is what it is. And here is the final pic of the half-done, non-working system:

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