Encountered P Solutions
A good engineer is someone who is capable of solving problems that they
encounter while they are building something. For an engineer, a project without any
problems doesn’t add the sweetness to the project. In the process of building this
car, we encountered several different problems, some were big, some were small;
some took long to resolve, some took minutes to resolve. First of all, figuring out how
the motor works was a huge issue. We were first thinking of using D/C motors to
control the car, however, they were really slow and it was a problem to make them
move left and right. Then, we actually found old car motors that had the option of
moving left and right and backward and forward. We killed two birds in one shot.
Now the problem was that we actually didn’t know how the motors were powered
and controlled, so we started to test each of the pins and did trial and error to
actually make it work. The motors still weren’t fast though we did solve the problem.
So we decided to use transistors so that it could help add more power and therefore
run the motors properly at a decent speed. After testing it, we were unsuccessful.
We then got an Adafruit Motor shield to see if by adding external batteries would
help power up the motors. It didn’t work either. We discovered that there was an
electric jumper that we had to remove so that it can take power from the external
source. It still didn’t work because the power must’ve been too low. We finally
thought of another way of powering the motors up; through the use of a power
supply. We got a 12V power supply and stripped the ends to the external power
slots on the shield. Once we powered it up, the motor finally started to work. After
many trials and errors, we finally got the motors to work. In between these trials, we
were thinking of just using ordinary servo motors during the time we failed.
Nonetheless, we did learn that if you want to get something to work, never give up
on making that thing to work. As time goes by, you’ll eventually get it to work.
Overall, these were the problems we encountered during our build process of the
car. However, we did find the solutions to those problems and we had developed a
100% functional car according to how we wanted the car to function. In all, we
were successful in making the solution to the problem that was proposed.
