Design, Construction and Control of a Seesaw System Driven with a Thrust Propeller

This work presents the design, instrumentation, and control of a seesaw system powered by a propeller mounted on a DC motor. The system was designed using SolidWorks and fabricated using a 3-D printer. It employs an Arduino Mega as a data acquisition board, establishing a connection with Matlab Simulink. The angular position of the seesaw is measured using a linear resistor(potenciometer), which is characterized using the least squares method. Subsequently, the propeller was mounted onto a DC motor, and the system's transfer function was characterized through the analysis of the step response. For this purpose, the input was the armature voltage of the motor, and the output was the angular position of the seesaw. The electromechanical device's control was performed using a proportional-integral-derivative control designed via the Ziegler-Nichols first and second method.