It’s been over a month since our first day of class, and looking back, we’ve made significant progress towards finding a solution.. Week 5 has been about condensing our findings into a Preliminary Design Report, visualizing our ideas with sketches, and expanding our research efforts.

After we established our concept sketch library last week, we’ve been filling it up with drawings of our feeder mechanism and loop fixtures. We presented our sketches to the liaisons, and they loved them. Further tweaks will be made, especially after we receive the catheter components in person and understand the full picture of the assembly process.

To help expand our scope of knowledge, engineering librarian Amy Buhler guided us to resources and some tips and tricks on crafting search strategies for sifting through patent libraries, journals, etc. This will come in handy when we work on our design architecture next week. We are also looking forward to potentially organizing a trip to California to visit a site similar to the one we are assisting in Mexico.