Power Take Off (PTO) Simulator

Designed and Fabricated a PTO simulator for an agricultural safety program at the University of Florida. The goal of this simulator is to show users their reaction time and equivalent distance they would be entangled based on this real-time reaction. For this project I properly sized the motor to allow the shaft to spin at the required 540RPM to simulate a tractor's PTO shaft. I also sourced each of the sensors and actuators used to accomplish this goal. A capacitive proximity sensor is used for sensing the presence of a participant's hand as well as for the reaction time calculation. An inductive proximity sensor is used to sense the presence of a pin on the shaft coupling for the calculation of RPM of the shaft. A through beam proximity sensor is used for the engagement algorithm. A large solenoid is used to engage a snag attached to the users wrist which is used to simulate the entanglement. An Arduino is used as the microprocessor controlling the simulation, displaying real-time approximations of the RPM, collecting reaction times accurate to the millisecond displaying them with their paired entanglement distance on a large pitch LED screen for user interaction all of which I wrote the code for.