This week was centered around the Prototype Inspection Day event held on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16th. On Sunday of the previous week, the team met to collect data on the timing precision and stress wave propagation in preparation for the event. Furthermore, our team created an eight minute presentation that summarizes our project, design challenges, and prototype results. On Tuesday, we gave this presentation to eight different judges. After presenting, we were able to answer questions they had regarding our material, demo our prototype, and receive their feedback.

The feedback from some of the judges indicated to our team that we need to adjust our plans for the rest of the semester to better address some additional design challenges that were identified. Concerns about the physical capabilities of our proposed system and the timing requirements were raised. Our team held several meetings during the remainder of the week to discuss these concerns and how we want to proceed with tackling them. An action plan was developed and sent to our coach as a feedback memo.

On Thursday, our team visited LDRAM once again to discuss our test set up with the lab members. After receiving helpful advice on how to mitigate noise in strain gauge signals, we were able to spend time testing aspects of our prototype with the oscilloscope at the laboratory, which is of much higher quality than the one that was available to our team during our Sunday tests.

On Saturday of this week, the electrical engineers met to further investigate the mitigation of noise within the measurement system, and also attempt to interface with an accelerometer we were able to obtain from the IPPD stock. During this meeting, some preliminary data was collected regarding the acceleration of the striker rod while being fired using the solenoid.