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
