Testing and Calibration Rig

In October 2021, we designed and built a testing and calibration rig to assist us with further hardware and software development on our jet-cart project. Main part was to obtain and connect a set of digital kitchen-weight load cells and organise those in a frame which would allow friction-less measurement of all forces applied on the cart structure.

Project stretched over couple months and is still in a work-in-process stage, while multiple goals were met already:

  • All 2D forces (forwards, backwards, strafe & yaw) generated by the jet-cart can be measured
  • Force values are electronically measured, collected and persisted through a Python application in RaspberryPi over UART connectors
  • System is statically stable, while adjustable for scale up
  • Weights can be attached straight to the cart frame to mitigate any phantom movements to get most precise values
  • Weights monitoring program allows their calibration
  • Actual forces are visualised on a screen with pythongame or ncurses libraries
  • 2kW PSU is available and tested for system continuous power feed

Future goals:

  • Logging mechanism
  • AI-driven calibration and feedback
  • Add 3D weights to measure roll and pitch forces

Development process itself has been documented in following posts:

TEST RIG – PART I
LOAD CELLS
TWO LOAD CELLS
TESTING RIG UPGRADE
TESTING RIG UPGRADE II

Leave a Reply