Innovative E.E

New electric escalator

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Inspiration

This innovative escalator has a goal to allow people with disabilities an alternative way to move between floors. It was inspired by a problem we noticed in society. To be specific, New York City. The elevators are often dirty or not in service. Many people use the elevator when traveling with babies and their strollers. The staircase can become an obstacle for many people. When shopping at Target we noticed that many elevators in stores are used to transport merchandise. It is interesting that Target has created an escalator just for shopping carts. A person can go shopping and go up an elevator while their merchandise is going up at the same time. It is faster, more secure, and visually appealing.

What it does

It is aimed to make transportation faster for people with wheelchairs. Innovative E.E. can attach to a wheelchair so transportation can be done faster and still independently.## How we built it To begin, we created a blueprint of our project's design. Increasing height by 25% would make our project gradually increase. We wanted it to increase height smoothly and not too fast so it wouldn't feel like a rollercoaster. We started at 4cm and then increased it by 0.25 seven times to create 7 pillars. We used the Pythagorean theorem in order to know how long we needed to make our board. We spaced each wood 8 cm apart. Base #1- It was a strong base. The 25% increase worked very well. We noticed that we needed to create space between the wood in order for our chain to move across. At first, we thought about using a saw to cut between our wood but it was insufficient. It would cut very slowly and the gaps would be messy. Base #2- We needed to make gaps for connecting the gear and chain. Therefore, we decided to use the high-power laser cutter to create equal spaces between the wood. That meant creating the wood drawing sketch again and precisely measuring each piece of wood again. We started the work on the motor using an external battery and trying to use an NPN transistor to act as a switch. However, we were unsuccessful in performing this task, so we chose to make the movement using Arduino, as it also allowed us to use sensors to improve the quality of our product. Arduino uses our laptop's battery as a 5V voltage supply, and we used the NPN transistor as a switch and set the motor speed to whatever was desired. Next, we trialed with a lot of different sensors for safety and other QOL additions to the lift. We tried to use a metal touch sensor to put at the top, but unfortunately, the sensor only worked with a human touch, and we couldn’t get it to work when coming in contact with the lift, but we liked the sensor and adapted it into more of a manual switch, similar to a simple ON/OFF button. For example, other sensors we tried were the Joystick for speed control, a laser head sensor as an alternative to the touch sensor, and many others, but none proved to be what we needed for our design. We initially thought we could use the bead chain as a chain to move in a loop motion but we couldn't build a gear that could move the chain successfully. We also tried using yarn, stretchy elastic, and paperclips. For the gear, we tried using a bottle cap, a wheel that was provided, and a gear that we designed out of wood using engineering edge. With trial and error, we observed that our strategies were not effective. The gear did not have as much mobility as a 3D printer could produce. We used Curo to design a compatible gear and chain that could be 3D printed.

Challenges we ran into

Time- More time would have allowed us to organize our ideas more comely.
Limited resources- We had no access to chain link and gear material to use in our project.
Precision- At first the wrong measurements in our gear did not allow us to properly create a loop movement. Communication- At first we bumped heads combining our ideas. We did not support each other's ideas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Teamwork is important because as a different individual, we had different perspectives, potential, and background knowledge that We got exposed to New Technology features we could apply in our careers. For example The fundamentals of 3D printing and laser cutting.

What we learned

Teamwork is important because as different individuals we had different perspectives, potentials, and background knowledge that We got exposed to New Technology features we could apply in our careers. For example The fundamentals of 3D printing and laser cutting.

What's next for Innovative E.E

Research- The wheelchair pick-up and drop-off functionality. Safety feature- Side bars to help support the wheelchairs. Sensors- To create a smart feature in order to detect when the next person could use the escalator.

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