As the holiday season begins and the semester begins to end, the DesiGators extend warm wishes to everyone for a joyful holiday season! We are especially thankful to our coach, Dr. Philip Jackson, and our liaison, Dr. Andrew MacIntosh, whose continued advice and feedback has been instrumental in our development throughout the semester. Thank you to the IPPD staff as well who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to get us access to the resources we have needed to make this project a reality. And last but not least, thank you to everyone reading this who has kept up with our project through our blog! Happy Holidays!

The focus of the week for the DesiGators was Prototype Inspection Day, an event where the team could show off their hard work to panels of judges and get feedback on their system and progress. On the day, the DesiGators were more than ready to show off their weeks of hard work, but one issue stood in their way: Rainesville. That’s right, Gainesville decided to live up to its dreaded nickname and turn the pleasant walk from the FSHN into half a mile of watery obstacles. Nevertheless, the team knew they couldn’t let the weather stand in their way and quickly devised a solution to get their sensitive electronics to the event safely.

The team was able to successfully transport all of their items to the Reitz Union and went on to have some amazing presentations during Prototype Inspection Day. The team received feedback on everything from their GUI design, load cell configurations, and possible additions to the system. The event was a great opportunity to make sure the team hadn’t overlooked any glaring details and reaffirmed that the project was well along its way on the path to completion.

Even with Prototype Inspection Day out of the way, the team wasn’t finished for the week yet. The team had progress on all fronts to discuss with their liaison at their weekly meeting. Korynn and Alex had spent the week diligently improving the air regulation subsystem, and were finally able to run a completed preliminary design past Dr. MacIntosh. The team received invaluable feedback on how to improve the design and account for things such as changes in pressure between the chambers and variances in flowrate. Virginia and Alex also spent several hours improving the code and now the team has a preliminary psychrometric chart feature that can plot values! Stanley spent the week improving the shelving and tray design to minimize the cost and weight of the system. As always, the team is making phenomenal progress!

For those of you who have read this far, thank you! Expect a Thanksgiving blog post next week, but until then eat lots of great food and happy holidays!

The DesiGators found their home away from home this week in the IPPD labs. The team spent countless hours split between Larry’s Lab, the Wertheim Prototyping Lab, and the FSHN lab working hard to get their prototypes built and ready for Prototype Inspection Day! The first item on the agenda was getting the airflow holes drilled into the acrylic drying chamber. Acrylic is a difficult material to work with, so the team enlisted the help of master engineer and director of the Wertheim Lab, Jeff Bielling, to help drill the holes.

With the preliminary holes drilled for the box, the team will be able to demonstrate how air will enter and exit the chamber while carrying moisture away from the food. Of course the next question the team had to address was what the food would be resting on inside the chamber. The main consideration was finding a mesh with large enough openings to let air through that was also sturdy enough to support its own weight. After a week of waiting and testing various samples, the team finally settled on one size and created their first set of trays!

The trays will need to be cleaned up and improved for the final design, but the concept works! The team was closing in on the home stretch for the week, and the completion of the tray design was the last thing that was needed. While the team had been working on the chamber and the trays, Virginia had been hard at work on improving the load cell configuration. She spent several hours in the lab soldering the load cells to their amplifier chips and attaching the 3D printed plates to the load cells themselves. The culmination of this week’s efforts can be seen below, a dual-load cell system which can be placed inside the acrylic drying chamber with a tray on top; this system can get accurate mass measurements and is the perfect visual tool for Prototype Inspection Day to show what our system is capable of. Stay tuned to hear how the event turned out!

The key to making any team excel is getting along with the people you work with. The more comfortable you get with your team, the more safe you will feel admitting when you need help or when you made a mistake. According to Ian Baldwin, the Director of Services at Infotech, this is the most crucial component in building an effective team. The DesiGators have adopted this mentality wholeheartedly. From making plans for holiday parties, trying new foods for the first time, and grilling after gameday, the DesiGators are no longer just a team. We’re a group of friends that just happen to work really well together. Go follow our Instagram and keep up with the rest of our adventures.

The DesiGators followed up their PDR presentation with an exciting week full of progress on multiple fronts. First on the list – the team earned their certificates for earning first place in the Six Sigma White Belt training! The certificates commemorate the teams’ achievement at the training and emphasizes their dedication to creating efficient workflows.

The rest of the week was punctuated by the team making massive leaps and bounds on the development side of things. To start off the week, Virginia headed over to Larry’s Lab and got to work soldering together the components needed to test the load cells that had arrived last week. Virginia’s hard work paid off and by the end of the week the team had a preliminary load cell setup that could consistently measure a set of calibrated weights!

In extremely exciting news, the first acrylic drying chamber arrived for testing! The team can now start modeling airflow through the chamber and begin modeling what the final chamber design will look like. The chamber exceeded all expectations; it was machined perfectly and crystal clear – perfect for the teams’ needs.

With the chamber delivered and prototype inspection day right around the corner, the team also began focusing their efforts on creating the trays to hold food within the chamber. The team developed some preliminary designs for the trays and how they would interact with the load cells, and made the determination that the final design would be side-loaded. The team also purchased various samples of wire mesh to help determine how various mesh sizes will impact the flow of air through the chambers.

What a productive week! The DesiGators made enormous progress and will continue to chug along on all fronts. Stay tuned for more updates as the DesiGators go full steam ahead!

The DesiGators’ weeks of hard work finally came to fruition with their PDR presentation! The team presented their design plans and project roadmap to an interdisciplinary group of faculty members from the University of Florida Department of Food Science and Nutrition, as well as their coach Dr. Jackson. The presentation was a resounding success and drew interest from numerous members of FSHN. The DesiGators celebrated with a team lunch and decided to take a break for the weekend before gearing up for the next week.

In the coming week, the team hopes to make massive improvements on their CAD models and begin integrating the sensors they have ordered into a working system. Time for the fun stuff to begin! Keep an eye for more exciting news from the DesiGators!

The DesiGators started the week with their Peer Review PDR Presentations. This was the team’s first opportunity to showcase their work on the project through a formal presentation. The event was a great opportunity to see how other teams were approaching the design process as both the 3Delish and SurgiGauge teams were present to display their work. The DesiGators received a ton of useful feedback that will be invaluable in improving their PDR Presentation for the following week.

At the weekly liaison meeting, the DesiGators had the opportunity to show off a major milestone in their progress: the completion of a preliminary GUI! Thanks to Virginia’s hard work, the GUI is able to show psychrometric properties given at least three parameters. This is an extraordinary achievement and puts the team months ahead on their progress with the Python code.

The team celebrated their success by attending FSHN’s Food Week, where they chomped down on plant-based hot dogs, chili, and other tasty creations!

After the coach meeting this week, Virginia took the lead on teaching a crash course on how to use GitHub to collectively edit code for the psychrometric chart programs. Virginia’s efforts have made tremendous progress on the code for the psychrometric charts and is almost ready for testing with our Raspberry Pi unit. In related news, the Raspberry Pi and humidity/temperature sensors came in!

During the liaison meeting the team had a lot of ground to cover to make up for missing Homecoming week, but no good meeting can start without donuts. The team supplemented their weekly coffee with donuts before diving right into discussing the upcoming PDR presentation. The team talked with Dr. MacIntosh about finding a room to have the presentation in and what FSHN faculty would be interested in attending. Once that was solved, the team moved on to the big topic of the day: load cells!

The team discussed various load cell configurations and the instrumentation options available to make them possible. The load cells are the last instrument the team has to finalize, but they made great work on avenues to explore. The team also showed the current SolidWorks model of the system assembly to Dr. MacIntosh; this segued into a discussion of getting all the major components of the system ordered before the holidays. With this goal in mind, the team will focus on narrowing down a parts list and creating a comprehensive Bill of Materials as soon as possible.

To end the meeting, Dr. MacIntosh took the DesiGators on a short tour of the pilot plant, where we all sampled a “GatorBev” produced by his undergraduate students. Tasty, refreshing, and the perfect ending to a productive meeting!

Photos by: Korynn Haetten

The DesiGators hard at work solving various thermodynamics problems for their food dehydrator. Photos by: Korynn Haetten

Happy Homecoming! The four-day week meant the DesiGators didn’t have the chance to meet with their liaison this week, but that doesn’t mean we were any less productive! The team took the week to tackle some of the more difficult mathematical problems associated with building a food dehydrator.

At the coach meeting, Dr. Jackson helped the team visualize what the thermal circuit for the system would look like and posed some interesting questions for the team about how to consider fluid flow inside the drying chamber.

Immediately following the meeting, the DesiGators met up again and Alex walked the rest of the team through the calculations behind his Excel calculator. The nifty tool will allow the team to get rough estimates for the sizes needed for the drying chambers and helps model the flow of thermal energy throughout the system.

Virginia took the role of instructor for the last half of the meeting and the team worked their way through a drying example problem provided by Dr. Jackson. The problem was a test of the team’s knowledge of drying, psychrometry, and thermodynamics and was essentially a textbook example of the thermal calculations behind a drying system.

Mathematical progress aside, the team made a major step in the development of their initial prototype as well! On Tuesday, Virginia and Dr. MacIntosh were able to sit down and purchase parts for the Raspberry Pi system and various temperature and humidity sensors. The parts should arrive next week (fingers crossed) which means the DesiGators can finally get their hands dirty. Stay tuned for more updates!

The DesiGators joined the rest of their IPPD cohort to attend the Team Building Workshop and White Belt Six Sigma Training presented by Florida Power & Light. The event was centered around process improvement and eliminating wasteful practices. The DesiGators were paired up with PolarFlow Optics to work on a simulation where we acted as a car dealership.

In the first round of the simulation, the dealership was run with a lengthy process that had many unnecessary steps that drastically slowed down the time it took to sell a car. The team only sold four cars and had an average of seven minutes per sale. A Six Sigma Black Belt and Six Sigma Master Black Belt then broke down the Six Sigma and LEAN mentalities and how processes could be trimmed down to improve productivity.

In the second round of the simulation, the team used an updated sales process to sell cars in a competition with all the other IPPD teams. The team managed to more than quintuple their sales, selling a total of 23 cars, and drastically reduced their average time per sale to around a minute and a half. The combined DesiGators and PolarFlow Optics team combined to have the most cars sold out of all the competing teams!

The team celebrated earning their Six Sigma White Belt certifications and simulation win by grilling some kebabs! The perfect end to an IPPD-filled Saturday!