Home Mechanical Electrical Computer Interface Schedule Tests Manual Notebook                
                               
Jeff Wilson         jwilson@vtc.edu
Dave Carlson   dcarlson@vtc.edu

                               
                               

Critical Tests:


Test #1: Wind
02-10-04


The wind test was intended to determine the wind produced from a standard computer fan. We used a 92mm server case fan and we measured the volumetric flow at approxamately 64 CFM. Wind measurements were taken at varying distances and angles from the fan.

This test proved that wind from a fan does not blow strait. We found the optimal wind to be about 15 degrees off center from the direction the fan is facing. This led us to devise a new test to see if the wind could be shaped.

Test #2: Shaped Wind
02-10-04


The shaped wind test was intended to determine the wind produced from a standard computer fan with the wind focused in one direction. We used the same 92mm server case fan as in the first wind test, but covered the front of it with a folded piece of paper to make a connicle duct for the air to blow through. Wind measurements were taken at varying distances and angles from the fan.

This test proved that wind from a fan cannot easily be shaped. We were hoping to find that the wind would simply behave how we wanted and blow more uniformly in a strait line, however, this test did not support our hypothosis. This led us to come up with the concept of having three fans on at any given time for a cooresponding desired wind direction. The middle fan would be on full, and the two adgacent fans would be on with a 50% duty cycle.

Test #3: Communications
02-25-04


To test the communications of our server to the parallel port hardware, we made a test circuit. This circuit worked by having the voltage from parallel port bits turning on LED's. These LED's showed that the port was communicating data.

The communications test proved that our web interface could send data to the parralell port via the code that was written for the server. A button on our web interface was clicked and LED's lit up on our test circuit for the cooresponding button click. This test was successful and proved that our web interface software worked as expected.

Test #4: Single Fan
03-10-04


To test the interface with an actual fan we needed volunteers in remote locations. We contacted several people and had them remotely interact with our web interface.

The fan test proved that a fan can be turned on through our web interface. The fan is known to push 119 CFM of air, and we already calculated that to be enough air to move our turbine rotors. The test was successful and the fan was turned on and off from varying remote locations including accross the room, across the campus, and across the country.

A video clip of one test can be found here: fan_test.avi (44.1 MB)     Or     fan_test.mov (2.7 MB)

Test #5: Webcam Test 1
04-06-04


To test to see if we could get a picture from the webcam or not, we plugged our USB webcam into the server. After installing the drivers and doing some tweaking, we managed to get a picture.

The first webcam test proved that a webcam image could be shown via a webpage. This was vital to our interface functioning as desired.

The image can be found here (click refresh to refresh the image): Single Webcam Image

Test #6: Webcam Test 2
04-08-04


To test to see if we could get an automatically updating webcam image on our interface page, we needed to write some code. We wrote some Javascript code to take the image from the webcam and update it automatically every second.

The second webcam test proved that a webcam image could be automatically updated and shown via a webpage. This was also vital to our interface functioning as desired.

The updating image can be found here (it was enlarged for testing): Automatically Updating Webcam Image
Code for the updating webcam can be found Updating Webcam (.htm)

Test #7: Multiple Fan Control
04-08-04


To test to see if our fan control code for our HC08 was working correctly we did a test simulating fans with LED's. The seven green LED's simulate our 7 fans, and the board is our motor controller board. This was after we migrated our data scheme from ASCII to Hexidecimal so we could use less data lines. We needed to do this migration becuase we needed 7 output pins on our 16 pin board, we were three pins short. With the ASCII scheme the scheme required 8 pins, and with hexidecimal we only require 5 which gave us the extra 3 we needed.

This test proved that we could talk to more than one fan. All of the code worked except for controlling fan 4 and fan 7. For some reason fan 4 and 7 were not turning on, but for the scope of our project, we determined that more than one fan could be controlled. The final debugging of our code will happen if we have time at the end of the semester. With only fans 4 and 7 malfunctioning, we will still have a fan control system that will sufficiently be able to change wind direction.