This week we started working with our physical components, both structural and electrical, to construct a prototype demonstrating our machine’s core features.

So far we’ve spent several weeks working on the content and artistic design for our machine, and after our PDR it’s time to put that work on the backburner and focus on building some real mechanisms, something the team has been looking forward to.

Our team decided that the most useful prototype to work on at this point would be one establishing the central components of our final machine. In particular, our goal is to create a physical track for a ball to smoothly roll along, as well as implement a microcontroller receiving sensor input and outputting to a fun LED display.

This meant splitting up to accomplish our individual tasks (even though that still often meant working next to each other). Next week, with several basic components completed, we hope to combine our work into one prototype displaying the basic functions of our final design goal.

With a ton of great feedback from our PDR presentation last week, it’s time for our team to look ahead to Prototype Inspection Day (PID) in just a few weeks!

This week we entered the prototyping phase by detailing the components that will be included in our prototype. At PID we plan to display a simple version of our ball track, with all the curves and spirals, and electronics installed, too. We broke this plan into individual mechanisms and planned the construction for each of these mechanisms.

With that planning done, we also began purchasing components to use in our prototype. Some of the materials, like wood and metal needed for the machine structure, are already available at the IPPD lab—but some, like our Raspberry Pi and metal ball for the track, needed to be special ordered.

The team can’t wait to begin building next week as soon as our materials arrive!

This week, after we further refined our designs, we had the privilege of presenting our preliminary design presentation to the Cade staff in Dr. Cade’s Garage. Surrounded by beautifully maintained vintage cars, we outlined our initial design concepts and project plan, and had some very helpful discussions about the future of the project. For our next steps, we will work on combining our designs into one complete sequence, and addressing the feedback given to us by the Cade staff.

This week team FunRaiser worked on finalizing concepts and incorporating these into our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) Report. Our team is very excited to share our ideas with the members of the Cade Museum staff Wednesday 10/19 during our PDR Presentation. This presentation will take place at the Cade Museum, pictured below.

Our visit to the Cade continues to inspire and guide us as we finalize our concepts for the different Mothers of Invention. We are taking all of the feedback that we received this week during our Peer Review Presentations to various faculty and other IPPD students, and incorporating it into this presentation.

This peer review session gave our team a great look into some of the other teams and what they are doing. It also has given us great actionable feedback on how we can improve our designs and presentations skills. Our team is working hard to create a great presentation for the Cade and we are excited to get their feedback on our work!

As our team continues to workshop the ideas from our collaborative brainstorming, this week brought even more fun—we finally got to explore the Cade Museum in person as a team!

As much as Hurricane Ian and the Cade Prize event tried to delay our meeting, it was fantastic to finally see the space where our final product would be installed. Carmen Hurtado, our Project Manager, gave us a thorough tour of the amazing areas and exhibits at the Cade. We asked plenty of questions about the specifics of the space, as well as took measurements to use in our designs. Of course, we also took a bit of time for some fun, playing around with the cool exhibits. As a team, we left the meeting with a much more solid idea of how we might implement our machine.

This new information will really help us as we finalize our design selections. Our goal is to converge towards the best options so we can begin prototyping. Pretty soon we’ll be presenting these concepts to Cade staff, and we’ll get to hear what they think!

We’ve started brainstorming! This past week we gathered together the research and ideation we’d done separately and finally began collaborative brainstorming. First, we discussed the breadth of all of our ideas, and began arranging these ideas in mind maps, like this one we made together:

After this, we mapped out some of our more tangible ideas, i.e. physical features that were thinking about including on the machine. We finally mapped out our more conceptual ideas and themes we wanted to emphasize.

There are so many fun ideas we’re thinking of to add to our machine! We’ll have to narrow down all of these ideas and decide what we want to dedicate our time to developing. Each of us on the team are really working our creativity muscles to imagine the coolest machine possible.

This past week, we got to work with team Chemboard for a Six Sigma team building workshop. Together we found ways to make our processes more efficient in a car dealership simulation. Jake was determined to make our dealership the most efficient of all the teams, but was mostly OK to settle for “most improved.”

We also attended lab safety training, and team FunRaiser is now certified to work in the HWLEE Prototyping Lab. We can’t wait to use the space to start our tests and prototyping. After some feedback from our liaisons, we have our first complete list of product design specifications. We intend to use these once we start concept generation, which we’re all looking forward to.

As of this week we’re officially Team FunRaiser, and we’re beginning to dig in deeper to our project and understand the task ahead of us.

We met virtually with our liaison at the Cade Museum, Ellie Thom, to introduce ourselves and talk about the project. Also attending this meeting was Carmen Hurtado, the Cade Museum Senior Product Development Manager. Carmen is the overhead manager of this project at the Cade Museum, and she’ll be working with us in the coming year, too. Ellie currently resides on the west coast, so Carmen will be our local contact when we’re actually checking out the museum.

After everyone was introduced, we jumped into talking about specifications for our project. The team had written up a Scope of Work document based on initial communication about the project, but being able to speak with Ellie and Carmen really helped us understand more details: what content needs to be included as part of the machine, the constraints for the machine and why, and what will be up to the discretion of our team during the design process. We had a lot of questions to ask Ellie and Carmen, and surprisingly we got through them all!

With a better understanding of the task in front of us, we began codifying some of the important details of our project, namely our primary stakeholders and our project design specifications. With these details in place, we’ll be able to design an interactive machine using the proper steps of the engineering process. In other words, nailing down these design specifications will help us make the best (and coolest) donation machine while still perfectly fitting the Cade space! Our next steps involve finalizing these details, so we can get to one of the most fun parts of the design process: brainstorming!

Hello, and welcome to our blog!

We are currently Team 03, official name TBD, and we’re all super excited to be participating in IPPD this year. We’ll be working with the Cade Museum to build an Interactive Donation Machine.

We’re just getting started, so we don’t have much for you yet. We haven’t even gotten to meet with our coach or liaison–but we couldn’t wait to come on here and say hi! Our team coach is Dr. Edward Latorre-Navarro, the director of IPPD, and our team liaison is Ellie Thom, Director of Product Development at the Cade Museum. As for us, check out who we are over at “Meet This Team”.

Here’s us hopping onto a Teams call to figure out schedules, plan agendas for our upcoming meetings, and delegate first week assignments. We’re hitting the ground running, and we can’t wait to get to brainstorming, designing, and more. Stay tuned to see what we’re up to this year!