We’ve finished our first prototype! Now we have to prepare for our first round of surveys starting on February 6th. We have the survey questions drafted, so we’re ready to move and begin testing. The flow meter finally decided to work, so that’s our most crucial expansion complete. We’ve finally got the user interface down to 2-3 options, which we are not exploring for the project’s duration. Stay tuned for more!
We’re back from Winter Break! We hope everyone had a great Holiday!
Over the last week, we have been organizing our schedule for the semester, and we’ve decided on a hard deadline for our product on March 28th! It seems like a long road, but we can get it done!
So far we are in our building and testing phase to get ready for our first survey sometime in February. We need one more component for the current board, and we should be prepared on the hardware side. Questions have been drafted up this week, and testing of a flow meter has begun. We are still weighing out our options for a user interface because of certain specifications, but we are still making progress there. Stay tuned for more!
We completed the first semester of IPPD! It took everyone’s work and time to get here and we feel really good. The SLDR presentation went phenomenally and we have a good plan for the Spring semester. We plan to hit the ground running, so we’re going to be fast-paced in the Spring.
There are a couple of things we are going to look at when we come back in January. The way the board “talks” to the computer is something we have to figure out for the labs to work, as well as data logging the sensors we are looking to put on the board as well. The logging of data to a CSV file or Excel file needs to be looked at, but those are some of the things we are planning to do over the break (when we can) and when we come back.
For now, that’s all we have for the Fall semester, and we can’t wait to begin the Spring prototyping!
We’ve completed PID! All things considered, it went well since we almost had a scare that morning when Luis almost spilled water on the prototype and one of the wirings was falling off, but we fixed that before any inspections. We learned a lot about our prototype that day so we are changing some things moving forward. Considering the scare of almost losing the board, we’re deciding to move the waterproofing of the board up to priority 3 or 4 since we don’t want to lose our hard work in the Spring when we test. Our user interface will continue to be improved, and the board is going to get a printed circuit board (PCB) for more organized connections. Olive oil caused some problems during PID so we’re thinking about using another fluid for two main reasons:
The semester is closing much faster than expected so there are two main things left on our agenda for the Fall Semester. First, we must complete the system-level design report to verbalize what we are going to do in the Spring Semester, and what we have accomplished. The team is also going to order some parts for the prototype before the Winter Break to have them so we can get to prototyping as soon as we get back from Winter break in January. This week is Thanksgiving so we hope everyone has a good break! Stay tuned for more!
This week we have pretty much finished with our prototype. Andrew did an amazing job simplifying connections to the board that are just plug-ins. This is a significant step towards our final design since we tested all the sensors and they work, so we know our hardware planning works! All that’s left before prototype day is putting together a presentation, and now we have time to add bells and whistles to the prototype (like a flow sensor). James is also making significant progress on the user interface by simplifying the existing layout. Luis has to test a new fluid before the PID and our prototype should be finished.
After prototype inspection day, we are planning to immediately prepare for the System Level Design Review (SLDR). Stay tuned for more!
This week we’ve begun prototyping and have made sizeable headway with the plug-and-play model on the board. We have also begun wireframing the user interface for students during lab. Our prototype for inspection day will have 2 expansions of the mini-fluidic experiment, where we are adding a flow meter that our Arduino board can read, and using a different fluid, olive oil, to demonstrate various properties of fluids that our board can read.
Next week we plan to finish our prototype and build the current mini-fluidic experiment to show off for inspection day for comparison. Stay tuned for more!
As we wrapped up the PDR last week, we are going to start prototyping for Prototype Inspection Day! We already have an idea of what we want to show on that day and it follows:
We’re thinking about using the Fluid Flow Module for both the old and the new kits. Stay tuned for more!
This week we got the PDR done. We did our presentation with Dr. Merida and things are continuing to move smoothly. Over the next week, we will do a couple of things to prepare for prototyping and Prototype Inspection Day.
Stay Tuned for more!
This week we went through our Preliminary Design Report (PDR) presentations to other teams in IPPD. We got great feedback and will knock our sponsor’s socks off on 10/18!
After the PDR, we plan to get some more details for prototypes and begin working on the new board. Stay tuned for more!
This week we’ve bounced back from hurricane Ian well. We have received the lab kit for our own testing, as well as the instructions on how to operate the modules in the kit
We’re getting ready for the Product Design Review (PDR) by further increasing our scope and concept generation detail. Next week we have a peer-reviewed presentation for the PDR before we present it to our sponsor. Stay tuned for more!