Today was THE day: Final Design Review! We met in the Reitz Union Grand Ballroom with the other teams and their liaisons to show our final projects. We are beyond thrilled at the prototype we were able to demonstrate. It took each of our knowledge, skills, and hard work to achieve it.

After our time with Randy and Roberto, the ballroom opened up to the public. Some of our families were able to attend and see what we’ve been working on for the past year. It was a great ending to an incredible year!

This week, SurgiGators continued to work hard towards Final Design Review.

We spent a lot of time this week focused on running our assurance tests. This is the information that will be presented in Volume 3 of our FDR Report. The Arduino is setup to log all the necessary data to a .csv file, which is then analyzed in Excel.

Today, we presented our Final Design Review presentation to our classmates for peer review. Although it wasn’t finalized, our peers had great feedback and suggestions that we’ll take into consideration this upcoming week!

Today, SurgiGators traveled to Naples to give our Prototype Inspection Day presentation to our liaisons and other team members at Arthrex. We were so thrilled to receive tons of positive feedback from the panel as well as advice as we look towards the next 2 weeks before Final Design Review.

We also had a blast exploring Naples and spending time as a team, including hibachi dinner and a trip to the beach! The next two weeks will be busy as we finalize our prototype and Final Design Review deliverables, so it was nice to enjoy some fun time to celebrate our successful day.

The past few days have been exciting for SurgiGators as we have been working hard in the lab!

We tested our newly prototyped canisters and have made some small tweaks to get them perfect. We also ordered the 80/20 aluminum for the cart to house all of the components of our design. After a few long days of work, the cart is assembled and even on wheels!

Next Tuesday, we head to Naples to show our prototype to our liaisons and other team members. We hope to get some final feedback as we head into the last few weeks of the semester! It’s an exciting time, and we can’t wait to put all our hard work together into one system.

We are so excited today because our canisters arrived! After a few small modifications, like caulking the tubing and plugging the hole in the bottom, we will be able to test them up to our maximum negative pressure specification. With some changes to the code to account for our new increased suction range, we’ll be ready to start building our system up to have two canisters with two different suction values.

On Tuesday, we participated in Prototype Inspection Day at UF in the Reitz Union. IPPD staff, coaches, and other professors listened to our project updates, saw our latest prototype demo, and gave us feedback on the progress of our project.

We were thrilled to be able to demonstrate that we have controlled suction working via the Arduino and regulator communication! An updated manifold design, the canisters that have been prototyped, all of the current electronics, and a new full CAD model of our project were also shown!

We will be going down to Naples to visit the Arthrex team in 2 weeks to show the engineers and project managers this prototype and get even more feedback as we head into the Final Design Review.

Following Spring Break, SurgiGators have been focused on preparing for Prototype Inspection Day next week! We met in the lab today and assembled most of the electronics, finalized some code, and worked on a new manifold design idea.

We were also excited today to see that our photo was used in the flyers around campus to advertise the IPPD program to other students!

SurgiGators have been busy making slow and steady progress on our individual tasks for our final prototype.

This week, we completed calculations and reviewed calculations for the customizable electronically controlled regulators. The preliminary canister design has been completed and sent to our liaisons for review. The overall CAD design was updated for a mini design review with our liaisons, which sparked conversation regarding the necessary shelving to organize all of our components.

This week, we will revisit the canister and overall prototype designs and modify according to the feedback we received. While we wait for a final quote on the regulators, we will begin exploring code to control the suction levels in the canisters. We also hope to continue discussions about the manifold locking mechanism and the interior tubing and drainage lines.