This week we met with Oscar and Hector of the previous year's Half-Scale team. From them we determined the causes of the issues with Stepper 2 and discussed the modifications that could be done to the switch mechanism. We also discovered that the previous year's team had never attempted to run the bogie through the switch. The following day we modified the drive shaft and the gears of the switching mechanism, while unsuccessfully attempting to fit a new wheel onto the left side of the lower switching arm to improve traction.
We then ran the bogie on the track, encountering problems with the lumps on the track caused by the welding process. We used a hand sander to grind the lumps until the bogie could pass, then attempted a switch. The bogie quickly failed and we determined that it needs more modifications to the switching mechanism to allow it to grab the track better, welding on the drive mechanism to keep the gears from slipping, and bug fixes in the code to make the stepper motor run more reliably.
Additionally, we brought in track pieces from the courtyard of the engineering building, for modifying the track so that we can test the bogie's ability to rejoin the track after a switch.