VEX - Control System

Project Description

A company would like to begin producing residential elevators. Your team must design the control system and a prototype of an elevator that can go between three floors in any combination. The prototype must include a set of three switches to represent each floor of the elevator. Each floor the elevator stops at must have a call button and a set of three lights to indicate where the elevator is currently located. A built-in safety mechanism requires that the elevator normally rest on the ground floor and return to the ground floor after a user-determined period of nonuse.

What Was the Most Difficult Part?

Several aspects of the elevator were difficult, but there was not one that was easily determined to be the most difficult:

• Tying a knot around the axle was difficult, so we just looped it through instead.

• At first, the lights would light up randomly and at wrong floors. We needed to readjust the values for when the lights would light up.

• While using the hand control feature, the elevator would move in tiny incremental amounts, even when the hand was keeping still.

Given More Time, What Would You Do Differently?

If we had more time, we would have:

• Made the cable connect to all 4 corners of the basket, making the elevator basket more stable

• Decrease the width of the shaft so the elevator can’t move around inside the shaft

• Tie the knot in the string on the spool instead of just threading it through the spool

What I Learned

During the building process of the elevator, all of the wires had to connect to the cortex. Since not everything was close to it, I learned wire management and more about the extenders that allowed some sensors to function. While coding for the elevator, one of my group members was already experienced in coding. I managed to learn everything that he was doing, which mostly involved void functions and timers. Through my own exploration, I learned absolute value parameters and creating multiple variables that update, and these helped in making the elevator not move randomly.

Preliminary Sketches

Final Sketch

Video of Elevator