This past week, the team participated in the IPPD System Level Design Review Event! All of the IPPD students, faculty, coaches, and liaison engineers were in attendance. The team’s faculty coach, Shuo Wang, along with two of NextEra’s liaison engineers, Nicholas Wayne and Amanda Peck, were able to come out to the event!

ROCCstart was first in line to present in Room 2340 in the Reitz Union, and had the chance to showcase the culmination of work for the semester. This included a lot of CAD models showcasing the electrical and mechanical components, along with completed software aspects. The team received many great questions and feedback that will be implemented for future reports and presentations!

We have reached the end of the Fall 2022 semester, and the team couldn’t be more proud of what was accomplished. Over break, parts will be ordered to begin physically prototyping when the team returns. The team looks forward to the Spring 2023 semester plans! See you all in January!

The Prototype Inspection Day (PID) offered an enlightening opportunity to step back, witness for ourselves, and share with our peers and judges all that has been accomplished since Week 1. Going into PID our primary focus was on the physical (mechanical and electrical) aspects of the device, getting the judges feedback on questions such as: How can we make things as simple and usable for the NextEra operators during installation? What might be some failure modes we should consider further? How can we ensure greater reliability?

Fortunately, most of the judges assigned to us possess extensive experience in electrical engineering and were able to think deeply regarding the problem being solved by us at ROCCstart. As I – a software engineer – am beginning to learn, any conversation with an electrical engineer will find its steady-state on the topic of electrical noise and its causes. Unsurprisingly, the judge’s immediate reaction to mentioning the vibration filled environment of the wind turbine was a concern for the signals propagating through the wires towards and away from our device. After hearing these concerns for the second time (first was during the Preliminary Design Review with the liaisons and higher-ups at NextEra a few weeks back), we will absolutely make sure to include signal testing in our plan.

Besides the discussion of noise, the judges all seemed to thoroughly enjoy our presentation, especially the CAD renderings (shout-out to Tom)! One final piece of insight we found interesting involved the development of a business case for our device: how much will it actually save/make for NextEra? This is something we have discussed as a team briefly at the beginning of the project, but never fleshed out. Granted, a full business plan is not within the scope of our project – the NextEra liaisons have prioritized a functional device over all else – even still, getting some insight from the liaisons regarding the financial impact of our project may provide a greater incentive for our team and impetus for implementation by NextEra once we are done.

Preparations are underway for Prototype Inspection Day! So much discussion has taken place in the past weeks with our liaisons, coach, and among the team about how best to utilize this time to present our design clearly and to ask the right questions to our judges. The team plans to utilize a 3D printed model along with a look at past models done by NextEra Energy!

In addition, much discussion has taken place surrounding the System Level Design Review, with a session dedicated to breaking down what is needed and how best to communicate the design. Final decisions have taken place for the design, and we look forward to presenting at the Prototype Inspection Day!

After having fully recovered from the tolls of traveling, and addressing the feedback provided during our PDR presentation, we shifted our sights to the next goal: Prototype Inspection Day!

Prototype Inspection Day is a way for teams to present their current progress to other teams, mentors, and sponsors. For our prototype, we plan to present two physical models: an electrical model, which shows the interconnection of circuit boards and subassemblies, and a physical model, which gives a general idea for the size, shape, and form of the completed project. We plan to provide both CAD models and physical representations of both models, which will allow everyone to understand the general concepts and intricate details of both elements.

After multiple delays, we received our ESP32 development boards last week. We plan to heavily base our electrical model off of these boards- not only do they provide a comparable amount of I/O and features to the desired project, but they are also approximately the same physical size!

For the physical model, we plan to create a shell for our devices that matches DIN-rail dimensions, with multiple module slots. We plan to 3D-print our finalized model before Inspection Day, to provide a tactile representation to our audience. We created a rough concept here:

See you next week!

This will be a short update, but we are so excited to tell you about it!

On Monday night, we traveled halfway across the state to Juno Beach, FL, home to NextEra’s main headquarters. On Tuesday morning, we traveled to their main office and we were greeted by an energetic Shridhar Nath, one of our liaison engineers, who graciously provided us a tour of NextEra’s facilities and multiple locations! We were joined by our second liaison engineer, Nicholas Wayne, as well as many other NextEra engineers we have had the pleasure of collaborating with. After touring each of the facilities, we were able to present our Preliminary Design Report presentation to a (very packed!) room of enthusiastic employees, ranging from HR and management, to principal engineers in every discipline, to executives and a VP! We were so excited to share the details of our project, as well as how we planned to execute our ideas, to a group with such diverse backgrounds.

We also received an immense amount of questions, comments, ideas, and general feedback. We plan to heavily incorporate much of what we learned from the meeting into our strategy going forward.

Fun week!