With preparations for Prototype Inspection Day underway, our team was busy this week picking up from where things left off before spring break. The mechanical engineers manufactured aluminum baseplates for the bronze bushings, wound the middle solenoid, and finalized the base plate design for the CNC machine. Next week, they will proceed with finishing up the remaining manufacturing.

Regarding the electrical side, the current driver and instrumentation amplifier portions of the final PCB were designed. The entire layout will be completed and ordered by some time next week. Also, the simultaneous firing of three striker rods was tested with the power supply.

Additionally, the full controller was tested with the DAC (with the striker rod in a fixed position), and debugging of the code was completed in order to be able to test with the current driver and encoder. However, some unpredictable behavior has been observed with the connections between the DAC and FPGA, and so a new perfboard has been soldered by Ian for testing. The team hopes to collect timing data on the full controller implementation before Prototype Inspection Day on Tuesday of next week.