Square wave output device

This is a group project that was done in the 3rd year of a 'Bachelor of mechatronics engineering' degree at Monash University in 2007. The aim was to make a mechanical square wave output with a 2 second period. At this point you may be asking why not use an actuator... but we were forced to use a nylon block to generate the square wave motion. Working around this, we used a fairly powerful motor (1Nm torque from memory), connected to a crank slider and a bistable metal rod which was allowed to change positions thanks to the flexibility of the nylon material that was supporting it. The output was measured by pushing a linear potentiometer. An Altera DE2 development board was used for the control system. A pulse width modulation algorithm was created to control the speed of the motor, and a frequency decoder algorithm was used to determine the period of the mechanical output, and then dynamically adjust the motor speed to keep the period at 2 seconds. The motor was interfaced with the board using a simple circuit comprising of mainly a power MOSFET for the switching, and an opto-isolator to protect the board from the high currents and transients that occur around the motor. Sorry about the poor quality, it was taken with a camera phone.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• mechatronics
• altera
• DE2
• board
• engineering
• motor
• PWM
• mechanical.

[Amishman35]

So that's how they made square wave generators in 1528 B.C.

[eliminategas]

hahahahaha... Impractical..

[Boastie]

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