Inverted Pendulum

It took us 8 weeks and a lot of lost sleep. Built from the ground-up: acrylic from Tap Plastics, scrap metal which we hand-machined into billet aluminum, an encoder salvaged from a motor, electronics on a breadboard (H-bridge built from discrete MOSFET's and an opto-isolator, two ATMega8's running in parallel at 20 MHz and communicating through SPI, talking through USART with a MAX232 to MatLab), a thousand lines of C and MatLab... Here's the final result.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• inverted
• pendulum
• control
• microcontroller
• embedded
• system
• sfsu
• aviation
• computer
• diy
• electronics
• gadget
• mechanics

[planckscnst]

I spy Sedra and Lathi on that table.

[uniment]

Good book to live by.

[planckscnst]

Great job! I haven't seen the rotating type that could recover from being knocked over completely.

How were you able to get it to rotate multiple rotations without it winding up your feedback wires?

[uniment]

Among all the things we made, a slipring out of brass washers. That single component took a couple days to make. Would've preferred something wireless, but we were running out of time in the semester; that would've been a project of itself.

[roskoeheat]

this is soooooo sweet! witch tap plastics?

[uniment]

San Francisco and San Mateo...

[sailthehighseas]

Hi my name is Matt. Are either of you two guys still around? I am working on an IP project at IUPUI in Indianapolis and was wondering if you had a few. blair4@gmail.com

[prozacoli]

muy buen trabajo,  very good job

[KimmyJoBarnes]

8 weeks vs. 2 years. I'd say you guys are superhero's