Gator Waves spent this past week continuing adjustments to the prototype. The mechanical engineers worked on modifying the starting position of the striker rod to be more reliable so that measurements of the rod’s position using the incremental encoder can be consistent. Also, three strain gauges were attached to the final design of the incident bar. Next week, the mechanicals will be machining and assembling bushings, a base plate, and an alignment plate.

Adjustments were also made to the implementation of the decoder in the FPGA in order to resolve an issue with increasing offsets in the position measurement, which arose this week during testing. Furthermore, the electrical engineers worked on implementing the reference signal in memory, setting up four additional instrumentation amplifiers, and verifying the transfer function VHDL code. Moving forward into next week, focus will be placed on finalizing the SPI module and also being able to measure stress waves at all points in the final design of the incident bar. Additionally, the team is preparing materials and a presentation for QRB 2, which will be held on Tuesday, February 22nd.