• Last spring I along with six other Penn State students competed in the Ride Engineering Competition that was hosted in Carowinds. We collectively placed 5th overall out of 12 teams. In this competition we were tasked with creating a fully ASTM F24 compliant scaled down roller coaster. In this competition I was able to verse myself in the governing standards from ASTM F24 in the ASTM F2291 documentation. I was also able to expand my knowledge of circuit design and programming.

• On a slightly more technical sense, my job was the control system design, which included the electronics required to the coding to assure that the ride was safe above everything else. 

• In this ride, the train would first run on a normal course, eventually it would reach a bend that had an IR sensor mounted on it to detect the train passing. This IR sensor only activated if the proper distance was detected to ensure that the moving track could not falsely trigger. The train would then pass this sensor to travel down a steep hill leading to a spike after it passed two other IR sensors. These IR sensors are configured in correspondence with the IR sensor at the top of the hill so that they would not start to detect a trigger until the top hill sensor was triggered to prevent the possibility of the sensors at the bottom false triggering resulting in the track prematurely moving. After the train valleyed, the two IR sensors found on the switch track communicated with the control system after the tire brake was deployed to direct how the wheel should spin to move the train until predetermined values for both IR sensors were read, which ensured that the train was centered on the switch track.

• After this process occurred, the brake fully locked the train in place and the track moved to the station. The track stopped moving whenever a limit switch along with a redundant limit switch were contacted ensuring that the track was aligned properly and then the train was released to the station. After the train was released to the station, it stopped using another brake tire until the track returned in the same fashion as before. Once the track was locked into its starting position, the train was then released to complete another cycle.

  • The track alignment process was something that the team was planning to rework as it failed to have a mechanical latch which would have ensured that the track could not misalign in the presence of a power failure. This was never implemented due to time constraints of the project. However, this was the most important thing that would have been addressed to ensure a higher level of safety for the starburst passengers by having the train unable to fall off of the track from the proposed mechanical lock.

• Other features that were programmed include a ride stop, emergency stop, and reset buttons that can be tripped at any time by pressing a button. This whole system was coded using ArduinoIDE and ran on an Arduino UNO.

Main Circuit Design of the Control System

Video of the Final Ride Operating