Hover Table -- Fall 2015
Summary: For the class Digital Design Lab, which meshed with my unofficial Signals, Systems, and Controls concentration, my partner and I decided to make a PID-controlled* height adjustable hover table using an FPGA**. While my partner worked on the code for the FPGA, I worked on actually building the hover table, which involved winding electromagnets by hand and designing the components such that the physics worked out.  The main challenge in this part was determining how big of electromagnets I could make with the current source we had, and from there, the maximum weight of the tabletop to be able to control its height with an object of approximately 5 grams on it. What I Learned: How to make electromagnets, laser cutting, and how to persist in the face of physics, including iterative design for the tabletop.
Documentation:Â presentation, final report
*PID: Proportional-Integral-Derivative. It uses terms proportional to the error, the integral of the error, and the derivative of the error to change an original state to a desired state. **FPGA: Field-Programmable Gate Array. Â It can be programmed in a Hardware Description Language (in this case, Verilog) to physically replicate desired digital logic.
