Electronics for Clown Mechanism

For the electronics, we had a motor connected to the input shaft, and we had a potentiometer connected to the axle where the coupler met the ground. Due to a lack of time, we were not able to implement a feedback loop utilizing the potentiometer. Since the entire mechanism only has one degree of freedom, we could determine the position of the mechanism based on the potentiometer angle and direction. Thus, we could vary the angular velocity of the mechanism. Our motor was driven with a TI Jaguar motor controller connected to a TI Stellarisware LM4F Launchpad microcontroller. This meant that we had the hardware necessary to use the potentiometer. The benefit of varying the velocity is that we could make the juggling motion seem more realistic. Currently, we only provided the motor with a constant voltage. The movement was not ideal because it depended on the balance of the mechanism.