G-Hug

Inspiration

Ray's School, Stuyvesant High School, has a club called StuyAviators where the students in the class learn how to pilot jets and airplanes with fligth simulators, but Ray realized that this wasnt accurate to what it would be like to actually fly a fighter jet, and since anti g suits are expensive and also dangerous fro a normal person.

What it does

G-Load uses an arduino uno to communicate with a 5v relay to either turn on or off a micro air pump or to close or shut an actuator. The air pump pumps air into two blood pressure bladders which are wrapped around someones legs to squeeze their legs to imitate the anti-g suit, as a sort of intermediary step to a real anti g suit.

How we built it

we used an arduino uno and a 5v relay to tell a micro air pump and an actuator whet to do , the actuator is normally closed which means it does not want to let the air through, the air comes from the micro air pump which pumps the blood pressure bladders full of air to compress the user's leg to restrict air flow to the legs kind of how when a jet pilot experiences g forces all of the blood in their bodies goes down to their legs which will also restrict air flow

Challenges we ran into

We spent an hour troubleshooting a problem that was a result of us not fully knowing if the actuator was normally closed or normally open since ewe thought it was normally open before we checked the amazon listing for the actuator, we also faced trouble with the box and components shifting around when we moved out legs when strapped in so we hot glued a majority of the components down to the 3d printed enclosure to prevent the components from moving and we placed friction tape on the bottom of out enclosure to prevent it from shifting and moving as we moved. We also realized that or enclosure was extremely plain so we added some stickers from the MLH Stand and from HackPHS onto the enclosure to make it look less plain, we also left the battery inside of the battery holder while powered on which led to one of the batteries leaking acid, so we had to scramble to find a replacement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the flight simulator to link up with the intermediate anti g suit, having fun, learning how a solenoid works, learning how a micro air pump works, learning how to make threads in cad, figuring out cost effective solutions to problems we encounter with the materials we were given.

What we learned

See above

What's next for G-Load

Adding pressure sensors to the blood pressure bladders to we can better estimate the amount of air we need to release or pump in order to reach a the feeling of a certain g force.