Inclement weather incoming! Not from Mother Nature, but from LineTech’s brainstorming. We successfully navigated this demanding week of design generation and documentation. Our primary focus has been conceptualizing and generating solutions for our automated conductor hoist, alongside refining our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) report for submission on Friday.

Following our meeting with Dr. Stubbs on Monday, we recognized the tight timeline for conceptualization and prototyping after she pointed it out. This prompted us to kick things into overdrive. A minor adjustment we made was to more accurately depict dates and increase the readability of our Gantt chart. We held a major brainstorming session on Wednesday in the Reed rooms, where we individually presented initial ideas. We soon realized our ideas converged, so we moved things over to the whiteboard as shown in the image and began ironing out more details of that specific design. This concept is a promising one that we plan to continue to research, especially after validation from our liaison engineers. We will continue to generate and compare additional ideas next week before confirming a final design. We are also looking forward to more specific information from our liaison engineers.

Looking ahead, we plan on focusing our efforts on researching components for designs and performing the necessary engineering calculations to ensure our design meets all required specifications. With this, we’ll be able to determine the best design for use in our final product.

Finally, we are excited to announce that we have coordinated our PDR presentations with FPL for October 20th in Jupiter, FL. We will also have a demonstration on October 17th to see in person the process that linemen go through to tension/sag conductor lines. We look forward to meeting our liaison engineers soon and beginning the prototyping phase!