Project Update - Electric Curtain Opener

Emmanuel taking notes for our project

We have made much progress on our project through out the last two weeks. One of the best achievements we reach was starting our work on our stepper motor. Before our current work on it, our work on the step motor was mainly over tinker cad. The disadvantage of this was that they did not have the exact model of the motor we were working on, so since we already had all the supplies with us, Mr.Huang recommended that we just do our testing with them.

Placement of stepper motor on our prototype

We used the preloaded code for our step motor and found that our particular model takes 500 steps to make one full revolution. Currently, the issues we are working on with our motor are how to increase strength with it and how to add a remote control to it.

To increase the strength, we thought it would be a good idea to just increase the torque on the motor, which we found we couldn't do with this motor. So another idea we came up with was to change the gear ratio; as of our current design, we have two gears in the proximity of the motor: one directly attached to it and another connected to the first gear which transfers energy over. The current ratio is 1:1 for both of these motors, so in order to increase power we thought it would be best to change this gear ratio with a smaller motor directly attached to the motor and a bigger motor transferring that energy.

Stepper motor wired with our Arduino

We also want to add a remote control to our project. Currently, we are looking through the sample code and libraries for the Arduino remote to see how we could efficiently incorporate them into our project.

We plan to finish our prototype in the next two weeks and have our motor revolving multiple times on commands backward and forward.