During Tom's visit this week, we succeeded in getting our spinner motor to work with the old servo driver card. It is one of our goals to replace this card, but the control signal to a new driver circuit will work the same way so this successful test with the old card will prove to be useful research for a new drving method.
Other than the spinner, we have been continuing to work diligently on our own separtate tasks. In light of Jeff's ladder logic experience, we have given him the task of programming the PLC to work with the system. That said, Jeff has been mapping out all functions of the track and documenting them to help devise the layout of his program. Mike has been debugging the inputs and outputs pertaining the the input and output elevators. Every input on the track short of these inputs are simply mechanical switches. These particular ones are mostly transistor switches and opto-isolators, so they are a little more complicated. Complicated as it may be, progress is being made. Ben has been researching possible temperature controllers to use from Omega, as well as tinkering with a sample controller received from Tom. We have a contact at Omega who will presumeably assist us in picking out the right controller for the project.