During our project, we have had some questions on what we are actually making. Well, they say a picture says more than a 1000 words - and we have finally been given a green light from TechnipFMC to show some aspects of the system. On the left, the whole HW stack running our system is depicted. On the right, the electrical actuator is mounted onto the brakebench - being operated by our system!

With several HW interfaces, there has been some wiring to be done. Since there are no standarized way regarding pinout on the different connectors on CANbus or Modbus, we have had to go through schematics for each entity ensuring each signal is terminated correctly. Atleast the job has been a bit hands-on!

Our project has without a doubt many internal and external interfaces, both hardware and software wise (Going out on a limb, we do believe our project has the most interfaces, actually!) . The last couple of weeks, we have struggled trying to setup the CANbus communication to the actuator. This resulted in several hours of head scratching before the hardware lead and software lead finally found the problem - luckily no one but the manufacturer of the PLC were to blame. In the picture, the table on the left is the pinout from the website while the pinout (or schematic) on the right is from the back of the CAN module. If you look closely, they are NOT equal to each other. resulting in a wrongfully connection. This shows how important proper documentation is to a system and its' users! That's why we're carefully documenting all parts of our system to TechnipFMC - more on that later!

Today, we had our second presentation. The team felt it went great, and hopefully you enjoyed hearing about our progress. If you did not get a chance to see the presentation, you won't get another one, as our group leader unfortunately forgot to record it. With all the other classes completed, we are ready to commit 100% of our attention on the bachelor project until deadline. Lets go!

The corona virus situation has escalated lately, and forced us to work from home. Luckily, we have mitigated this risk in our risk analysis, thus allowing us to continue the momentum of our project regardless of the virus. That being said, collaboration is definitely most fun and allows us to communicate more effectively. As depicted, Arnfinn and Stian is working together on the creation of the interface to the Brake Bench used in the FATs. Hopefully, we can continue these types of interaction in a few weeks!

Our system has a handful of communication protocols that our system needs to utilize. One of them, is CANbus. CANbus is originally made for communication between different nodes in cars, but is also widely used in other areas in the industry. Currently we are baking our heads in order to get the communication up and running on between the electrical actuator and the controller. We're deep into Linux mods, CANbus-libraries and signal-monitoring, but will hopefully yield results soon! Ps! We have created an Instagram. Follow us by clicking here.

We are well underway with our prototyping, trade-off analysis and proof of concept! We have gotten ourselves a hardware rack with different platforms that can run our system and contains surrounding network, thanks to TechnipFMC!

We held our first presentation today. The video can be seen here.

Because of the Corona virus, the presentation will be held both live for the sensors, but also streamed on Zoom. In order to get this right, we had to spend some time on the setup.

TFMC has been generous and granted us an office in the manufacturing department, as well as a lot of equipment. This will help us work close to the hardware we are using, and the people we will cooperate with.

Had a lot of meetings with the stakeholders now, and are getting to know the project

We are really excited to get started on the project! During the last six months we have been getting to know each other, and doing team building activites like driving go-karts.