This week was a major milestone for our team. Tuesday was our System Level Design Review (SLDR), an event we’ve been preparing for throughout the semester. The day started with an interactive keynote session, where IPPD teams and liaisons gathered in groups to participate in discussions highlighting key questions, common misconceptions, and practical advice about working in the professional engineering industry.

After the keynote, we had the opportunity to present our SLDR to our liaisons, other project teams, and attending faculty. We formally showcased our updated system architecture, hardware layout, and the overall design direction we’ve developed this semester. It was extremely rewarding to finally share everything that we’ve been working on. It was also very validating to hear questions and feedback from people outside our team.

Overall, the SLDR was a huge success, and it was exciting to show off the work that the team has poured into this project. As we head into break, we’re looking forward to continuing development, refining our prototype and testing approach, and preparing for extensive prototyping next semester. There’s still a lot to do, but this week has made us even more motivated and confident moving into the next phase.

Below is an image from the SLDR event, and it will be updated once the professional photos taken at the event are made available to us:

This week, FeraFree participated in the Peer Review for our System-Level Design Review (SLDR). We had the opportunity to present our current design and progress to three other IPPD teams – LineTech, DreamSteam, and RideOn – as well as the IPPD Lab Manager Lawrence Warren. This was extremely valuable, as it allowed us to gather feedback on both the technical details and overall delivery of the presentation before the SLDR event on December 2nd.

This feedback will help us pinpoint areas that need clarification and improve our presentation flow and slide organization as we move forward. Additionally, attending the other teams’ presentations gave us insight into different approaches being used for system-level reviews.

Attached below is a photo of our team after finishing our presentation!

This week, our team has been fully focused on locking down the final details for our System-Level Design Review (SLDR) report. We’ve made significant progress and are now close to completing our draft for the peer-review presentation on Tuesday, November 18th.

At the same time, we’ve continued our sensor testing efforts, specifically with several new sensors that arrived this week. These additions have helped us gather more data and explore alternative sensing approaches, and we hope to continue evaluating which technologies show the most promise for our system.

Below are pictures from one of this week’s testing session:

This week, our team had the opportunity to attend the University of Florida IPPD Prototype Inspection Day (PID) and showcase the first iteration of our project. We presented a preliminary mechanical model along with a sensor testing setup to several groups of UF faculty.

PID gave us the chance to explain our design decisions, walk through our testing process, and gather real-time reactions and feedback from experts with diverse engineering backgrounds. We received feedback on our mechanical layout, sensing approach, and system integration strategy, which we will use to guide the next phases of our project.

Overall, this event marked an exciting milestone as we transition from conceptual work to physical prototyping. We look forward to refining our design based on the feedback we received to build toward a fully functional system.

Below are some pictures from the event:

This week marked an exciting milestone as we began the first phase of sensor testing for our project. Our focus was on evaluating different sensors to determine which are the most promising for our project’s scope. Through these tests, we started ruling out incompatible sensors and focusing efforts on those that provide measurable responses.

At the same time, prototyping of our CAD designs has already begun as we prepare for Prototype Inspection Day on November 4, 2025. We’re excited to transition from the conceptual design stage to hands-on prototyping, where we can begin integrating our selected sensors into the physical system and testing their performance.

This week, our team traveled to Palm Beach Gardens to deliver our PDR presentation to NextEra! Due to how far the road trip was, we actually stayed at a hotel overnight and headed over to the NextEra headquarter the morning after. In our arrival to the NextEra facility, we were set up with visitor passes and got a brief tour of the facility with Sharon who was the PGD(Power generation department) Technical Services Manager. We were able to meet with both our liaisons engineers (Drake and Malcolm) and got set up with a meeting room to present our PDR. Everyone did an excellent job presenting their sections of the slides, and afterwards we opened for discussions. This allowed us to address both technical and non technical questions about our project and receive valuable feedback rom the engineers. With Prototyping day coming up, the liaisons offered to send us a sample roller bearing system for testing. This was a valuable resource as it saved us the time and resources needed to make our own system from scratch! NextEra also provided us with lunch, giving us the opportunity to bond with the liaisons and learn more about the company After lunch, we enjoyed a more in depth tour of the NextEra facility, met with Senior director Devin Martin who was one of the executive sponsors for our project, and gained further insight into their operations. Once the tour concluded, we thanked the liaisons and said our goodbyes, and began our drive back to UF. Overall it was an amazing experience from start to end! For the upcoming week, we will be doing sensor testing and design prototype for the sensor sampling and processing.

This week, we finished our preliminary design review final draft and completed testing code for sensor testing procedure. After our PDR presentation last week, we worked on improving our slides and adding relevant content in preparation for our real PDR presentation to NextEra Energy on 10/22. We hope to start prototype production and sensor testing in preparation for the upcoming prototyping day. For preparation of our speeches to the liaison, the team agreed to get together and practice presenting on each of our own sections, with the rest of the teammates not presenting actively listening and offering feedback. This will greatly help our confidence come the real presentation and allows for improvements on the slides based on feedback made by other teammates. We plan to do practice runs for the speeches, but after enough practice sessions, we will send the best one to our coach to get his feedback on our presentation. The coach may also ask us questions as practice for when the liaisons or people of NextEra Energy will ask us questions, but also the coach’s feedback could be immensely useful. We can’t wait to travel to Palm Beach Gardens for our presentation!

This week, we submitted our preliminary design review (PDR) as well presented the PDR to our peers and coaches. We received feedback on how we could better prepare for the real presentation in front of our sponsors coming up in two weeks! It was also insightful to see how our peers’ projects were also developing and to take some inspiration from their presentation for our own. Furthermore, the team has completed purchase requests needed for grease testing; this includes buying various sensors and testing equipment, as well as setting up the sensor testing schedule. We are excited to get hands-on testing of the sensors to actually see what methods we have developed work or not, and reflect on these changes for our PDR in our preparation for the presentation to NextEra Energy!

This was one busy and productive week! Our team spent a lot of time together brainstorming ideas for how our sensor will be implemented. This image of our whiteboard shows some of the potential candidates we may be working with. Our biggest next step from these concepts is to begin testing. We have a lot of testing and modeling to do to ensure our system will be as accurate as possible. Another exciting development this week was receiving some grease samples from our sponsor! These samples are going to be critical to our development process.