5/5

This week I tested a few different ways to fix the problems that I've been having with my balancing rig. I also finally got to do a full test with the PD loop and the spinning gyros. The 3d printer gave me a lot of problems, so I was setback about a day and half, but still managed to get a decent amount of progress on my balancing rig.

I ended up with one main problem, which is that the vibrations from the spinning gyros are throwing off the reading from the accelerometer, and making it useless. When I ran the test, the read from the sensor fluctuated a ton, and the servo would just randomly move the gimbal to random positions.

The highlighted values are the accelerometer readings. The readings from these three 25 millisecond intervals shows the amount the value is deviating.

I first tried putting some "vibration absorbent" pads I found on amazon in between the breadboard of the accelerometer and the chassis, but they didn't work at all.

My next option was using the collets. As I said before, this gave some slight improvement, but not nearly enough to stop the accelerometer from being thrown off.

Then, I tried fixing the issue with code, by averaging out the raw data from the accelerometer to try and get a less sensitive reading from the sensor. If the deviations were just that(deviations) this would have worked fine. But the vibrations completely throw off the accelerometer, and the reading goes all over the place.

This takes the last three values of the accelerometer(Accell, Accell2, Accell3) and gets the average

I also modified my Gimbals to fit the collets I talked about in a previous post. The collets attach directly to the center shaft of the motor, meaning that they spin directly in-line with the rest of the motor. While I did see a significant improvement over the previous design, the vibrations were still present. If I can't find a way to negate these vibrations, then I may have to leave this project where it is and move on, as I've found no other way to fix the accelerometer getting thrown off.