Week 8 Progress

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During week 8 of our Engineering Design Project, we were able to get the finalized dish holder part with the correct dimensions and we were able to create a draft for out Final Project Report and a final specification sheet. We calculated the precise distance between the big magnet and the dish.

The biggest progress, however, was with the image processing and motor control code. We were able to create a code in MATLAB that can control the stepper motor. Moreover, we were able to adjust the code for the image processing - since the processing is really dependent on the environment we adjusted the light settings as well as the radius of the magnetic sphere. Most, importantly we were able to combine the motor control code with the image processing so that the moment the sphere gets into the fourth quadrant the motor starts spinning counterclockwise - the goal will be to keep the magnet on the positive x-axis (the origin of the coordinate system is at the center of the circular track).

Final Setup 

Middle stage

Image processing code

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