Worknight 3/21/19

With spring sports in full swing we have to start our work nights later to allow many of our team members to get their practice in before we have our meeting. It makes for some long days and late nights but we continue to move forward as we near our target date for completion.

Tonight we wanted to bench test our new energy storage unit. The old unit worked ok in our previous tests but we wanted to experiment with super capacitors. We have never used them before on a project. It took two weeks to design, build and test the circuit but it worked. Now we have to mount it on our limb tester to give it a walking test.

What we want to see is the unit store the electricity created by our generators and then slowly discharge it. You will see a video below that documents that charge dissipation. By storing more electricity we hope to power both the SmartPuck battery and our BlueTooth module. We met our goal earlier by generating enough energy to power the battery, now we just want to see if we can improve it to also power our wireless connection.

Next week will be the big test to see if it works with our limb tester.