Monster Gator started off the week with an amazing presentation for the Qualitative Review Board 1 and presented convincing evidence to ensure that the team has a strategic plan, is aware of any foreseeable risks and mitigation strategies to tackle them, and is on track to complete the project successfully on time.

Lead up to the Big Event:

Monster Gator team had their first on-site testing event scheduled for this weekend and were taking all measures to ensure that the event went as smoothly as possible by running multiple tests and troubleshooting any noticeable flaws in the prototype before a large-scale on-site test.

• Started by conducting unit tests for each of the individual components of the prototype to make sure they worked as intended.
• Next, performed integrated system tests to ensure that all components were interconnected and worked in unison as expected.
• Finally, ran some stress tests to subject the prototype to extreme conditions and some edge cases to ensure the robustness of the hardware as well as software systems.

Monster Jam On-site Testing, Tampa:

The Monster Gator team traveled to Tampa on Friday, a day before the Monster Jam event, to install all parts of our prototype on the Monster Jam ride truck. The work accomplished on that day included:

• Installing the newer design of the hardware mounts for testing compared to the older design.
• Running cables from the mounts to the back of the truck where all the electrical and computing devices were located.
• Making all the electrical connections and installing a sensor to provide accurate inputs from the ride truck for each ride.
• Attaching the electrical and computing devices securely to the truck.

On Saturday and Sunday, the team was provided some time before the event to make any fixes and run some internal tests before the gates would open for the public. Once the ride truck was open for public, we tested the automated software by monitoring the progress on a separate device. The event allowed the team to get some sample data by having the prototype run on the ride truck with real customers for an extended amount of time. Even though the team ran into a few unexpected issues when running the software and hardware with the ride truck, the team was quick to fix any major issues on the go to keep collecting useful data and learned a lot from the event about how the Monster Jam ride trucks operate, the dynamics of how the event attraction is run, and possible issues that need to be addressed. Overall, it was a great learning and fun experience which has allowed the team to be confident in being able to come up with a much improved full-scale prototype for the next on-site testing event.