What an end….Our liaisons Alex and Elizabeth drove up from Naples to attend our official SLDR presentation this week, preceded by a few hours of networking and a phenomenal guest speaker, Quang T. The preliminary events were such a wonderful idea on the IPPD program’s behalf, as it not only allotted time to connect with our liaisons outside of weekly technical meetings, but it was a great opportunity to meet the liaisons of a few other teams.

The following SLDR presentations paired us with a few teams that we hadn’t seen before, and everyone’s progress has been astonishing! Gratefully, our SLDR presentation was also well-received by our coach, liaison, and other IPPDers. So, with the corresponding SLDR report signed and our Spring plan mapped out, we will ready to hit the ground running again in January.

Though the peer review SLDR was a great opportunity to develop our presentation skills and hear about other awesome projects, we continued to reach out to our coach and liaison specifically afterwards for additional improvement. Based on their feedback, we decided to gear the focus of our presentation from what we have already completed this semester to our plans for the spring to better emphasize what Arthrex and IPPD can expect from us come April. Framing it in this light would also allow us to showcase the fact that our progress thus far puts us on a great track to meet our spring goals. We now have a week-by-week spring schedule for both the mechanical and electrical divisions of our team to make sure we stay on track and keep up our amazing momentum from the fall. We’re excited to see how it’s received during the real SLDR.

Here’s a picture of our team completing dry runs the night before our real SLDR!

This week we teamed up with team members and coaches from MaeChem Silanes and PolarFlow Optics to conduct the peer review System Level Design Review (SLDR).

Our team had a great time presenting as well as listening to the other two teams. 

We were able to get a great amount of feedback ranging from ideas regarding our product development to tips on how to help our audience better understand our design process. Being able to provide feedback to other teams also allowed us to see areas we need to improve upon within our presentation.

With all that said and done, we now approach the actual SLDR. 

In this week, the team reached a major milestone in presenting our prototype on Prototype Inspection Day (PID).

We showcased a functioning prototype for the product in addition to our testing hardware and methodology. We were fortunate to gain feedback and evaluation from a fantastic group of judges with diverse backgrounds, allowing for ideas and constructive criticisms from different angles. We also had the opportunity to share our prototype with peers from other IPPD teams and explore their prototypes as well. It makes us proud to see the fantastic work that Gator Engineers at IPPD are doing!

We are excited to evaluate and analyze the feedback received from PID to make adjustments before our next major milestone, the System Level Design Review (SLDR).

In the coming weeks, the team intends on continuing to test our design and make continuous and iterative improvements.

This week, the team continued to make progress in prototyping as we rapidly approach PID next week. We’ve begun implementing many of the feedbacks provided during PDR, including the building of a testing system as shown with the linear actuator figure.

We also had major break throughs in our sensors and have data to analyze! The team is extremely excited to begin sensor testing and troubleshooting in preparation for our final design. So far, the sensors have met our expectations, allowing our project to move forward smoothly.

With different sub-systems moving along at such a fast pace, keeping a clear vision for each one and their current state will keep up on pace for PID. To better demonstrate our ideas to the judges next week, the team has put together a poster board that explains the design methodology of each subsystem. Alongside the board will be physical demonstrations of our systems for the judges to interact with.

The SurgiGauge team made great progress this week and we hope to carry this forward through PID next week!