ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 11

Project Status – Qiongyu Lou

It was a very productive week for us. We kept revising our Gate Review 3. We revised our CAD design, the motor calculation, battery selection and after all these work, we started to purchase our components. After all the components arrived, the model can be made. Besides the revision of Gate Review 3, the financial analysis was made to get resource for our poster. For the poster, we found the place for printout. Ziwei will be the master of our poster design. Steven and Queenie would do the financial and market analysis for the poster design. I think all of our parts are good so far and it is snowing!! We will definitely beat it!!

Interesting Finding – Steven Kung

This week we are still fighting with the proof of concept. In our original design, we plan to put tank at the middle and battery at the bottom of the product; however, we find that if we can put tank at the bottom, the middle part of body can become thinner and more aesthetics. Also, it is easier to refill the tank just plugging it out. For this reason, we change a little about the skeleton design that we will use " I " shape rather than rectangular shape to make it lighter and thinner. Although it will increase step to manufacture, it still worth to make this slight change.

Challenges - Yaqi Huang

At first, I thought the CAD and the manufacture of our products should not be difficult. However, after I started to work on CAD, I found I was wrong. To make the CAD of the product, a lot of details need to be thought about. The toughest thing is to design. Sometimes I did feel it should be easy, but I didn’t know how to start. For example, the outside case is a big challenge for us. We need to take the shape, the way to manufacture, how to take off into consideration. Another thing is the detail. For example, we need to check the screw table to decide which screw to use. Besides the size of the screw, we even need to think whether this screw is strong enough to apply here. Fortunately, we already did 99% of the CAD. And we already got the most parts we needed for the product.

The next big challenge is to manufacture. In our group, not everyone has the experience of manufacturing. To manufacture successfully needs experience and carefulness. I hope we can finish this part as soon as possible. And we already started to build the product on Friday. Hope the product works!

Future Plan – Ivan Manuel

In the check-up meeting with prof. Brei last Thrusday, she noted that our group is behind schedule. We need to finish both poster and prototype by this upcoming Tuesday (11/26). Therefore we have split up our 6 members in which 3 people are in charge of poster (Steven, Zi Wei, and Qiongyu), and the other three in charge of prototype manufacture (Ivan, Chee Wee, Yaqi). Unfortunately we had to wait for all our parts and materials to come in, before we start manufacturing it. We were scheduled to start finish our mill, lathe, and water jet printing on Monday, and since our design is not that complicated, we are targeted to finish assembly on the same day. Worst come to worst, Tuesday morning will be our final deadline. For poster making, we are lucky enough to have one School of Information student, Zi Wei, who is very creative and know what should we do with the poster design.

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 10

Project Status – Ivan

This week, we got feedback of our GateReview 3 from professor. The result was not good and it seemed we missed a lot in the report although we tried so hard in last week. Almost everyone reached their limitation to do the work. We felt so upset. But it was good to know our shortcomings before we actually try to make the product out. We got a lot from the meeting with professor and our coach. It was really helpful, they not only provided key points we needed to add but also suggested us a reasonable plan in this week. We redo the report, recalculate the force and find out another motor and another battery. We changed our design from one grip to two grips. We redo our CAD and redesign the inside parts. Also, we changed the position of the battery and the liquid tank. The whole team worked very hard this week. We all try our best to solve all these problems as soon as possible to leave enough time for our design EXPO.

Exciting/interesting finding  - Yaqi Huang

This week we got the feedback for GR3. It was not good. We needed to refine a lot staffs and add more details. But in this week we did have some improvements. These improvements made us more confidence and exciting. First of all we found the motor. It had really good stall torque and no load angular velocity. We did not need to use gear any more. And the interesting thing was the motor was the last one in stock and we GOT IT! Second we found the battery. Now we already decided the battery, motor and pump. It seems the main parts of the product all has been selected. Another thing was we started to redo the CAD. We kind of redesigned all the inside parts. We totally changed the position of the battery and the liquid tank. We choose use a bar to mount everything. We designed a new method to refill the deicer liquid. Now the tank was connected to the bottom of the product. The whole tank can be taken off to refill. It was much easier to do this. We do spend a lot of time on this. And all of us hope we can success at the end.

Challenges – Ziwei Xie

The passing week was a very tough and upset week for us. On Thursday, we got feedback for our GateReview 3. It was not good although we tried our best. In the meeting with professor Brei and Dr. Luntz, we realized that how many things we missed in the report. Seeing other groups’ work, we got an idea about what each part should look like. As in the last week, we changed our design a lot of times and had some arguments about the final design in the team. Maybe this was the main reason why we didn’t do a good job on GateReview 3. The main challenge in this week was the time. We need to redo so many works. We rescheduled our plan as professor Brei suggested trying our best to find out a new motor, a new battery, recalculate the moment of force, redesign the handle and grips and did research in ergonomic area to figure out the best length of the handle from users’ aspect. Although it was a very tough week for us, we felt it was worthy. The more we did, the better we can make in the incoming design Expo.

Future plan

After submitting our Gate review 3, professor Brei and Dr. Luntz agreed to allow us to redo our entire report because most of the design in our gate review 3 are not up to their expectation and has a long way to go. The design we submit was lack of tons of details, and we are planning to improve that to a more professional standard. Firstly, we have to improve our Kansei section so that we can get more accurate results of what our customers actually looking for, so that we could include them in our product design. Secondly, we need to add a lot of details to our design, like how to manufacture, how to fix and mount every part together, and where to put all the screws and bolts to assemble everything into a piece. Also, we need to consider the ergonomics and aesthetics of our product as we will need to sell our product in the market eventually. Now, we are planning to start our manufacturing process the coming Monday and at the same time continue working on our report so that we are not too far behind the schedule.

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 9

Project Status – Ziwei Xie

This passing week was a very productive week for us. We successfully finished GateReview3. The work includes the overall design of the product and the choice of material. Additionally, we did an experiment where we tested the performance of the product under certain circumstances. We verified the usability of the design we chose. In order to further determine the visual impression that different designs might have on people, we made a survey that checks all 8 designs with different colors (red or blue), shapes (curly or straight) and handles (with molded pattern spongy or not). The questions in the survey are about two properties of the designs; one is the durability and the other is the handle’s performance (in terms of comfort). The survey told us that most people liked blue curly designs with molded pattern spongy handle, proving that our choice is very correct.

Interesting finding –Chee Wee lee

Immediately after we got back our Gate review 2, we started our discussion on Gate review 3, particularly on the design of our product. During our discussion, we found out a lot of interesting stuff, including how the electric toothbrush works and how difficult it is to design the product we imagined so far. It may seem easy when you look at the electric toothbrush, but there is actually a bunch of stuff going on in it that needs some effort to figure out. One of the interesting thing we noticed in our project is that the way to link the motor shaft and the brush head is kind of complex and difficult. Firstly, if we stick the shaft in the hold on the brush head, it will most probably slip out of the hole as soon as the device is being put on the windshield with ice, due to the high frictional force between the brush and the icy surface. Secondly, assuming the shaft will not slip from the hole, the huge frictional force between the brush and the icy surface will cause a large torque on the motor shaft, which will most probably break the shaft in no time. It is really good to realize all these now before our product actually fails during the testing stage.

Challenges – Steven Kung

This week was a really tough week for me and the whole team. We finalized our design for the project, during which, we tested the product functionality, selected materials, and finished the engineering drawings. We suffered a very hard time in deciding the motor methods, the positions of each component, the materials and the external appearance of the product. During Tuesday’s  and Thursday’s meetings with Professor, we got ideas about how to change the CAD and finalized our product design, which enlightened us a lot. All of us worked more than 5 hours every day in this week to research, discuss, calculate and test our design again and again. Now we are in the final step of this week and also in the final step of Gate Review3. Although, it was a very hard week for me and the whole team, we made a big process for our project. I felt so excited to see the product designed by ourselves working so well. 

Future Plan –Queenie Lou

This week we are struggling with Gate Review 3. We changed our design in CAD several time. We finish the engineering drawings and manufacture plan. We bought all the parts for prototype and we will try to machine and assemble them next week. For the paper work, we will go to sweet land to revise our final report. We will meet with professor and Dr. Soo to finalize our design and product manufacturing process. After this, we can start to write our business promote plan and combine into our final report. After we finish our prototype, we can start to test by using our prototype.

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 8

Our project status – Steven Kung

Our team decides to submit GR3 report on next Monday and each team member has started to write contents for activity. Also, we are trying to do some simple experiments to test our mechanism design. We bought two pieces of glass, brush scrapper and deicer from the auto part store and put the glass in the refrigerator to make ice on it. With deicer spraying, we test whether brush work or not. On the other hand, we start to create another survey to understand aspect of aesthetic and ergonomics. Two of us will use solidwork to draw the engineering drawings for our product, such as assembly drawing or part dimension drawing. And we will take the drafts to Bob, checking its feasibility. Manufacturing and validation plan can be carried out after we finish the CAD.

Existing/interesting finding – Queenie Lou

This week, we started to work on our gate review 3. We bought the glass as the prototype of the windshield and we use chamber to get ice on the glass as the experimental condition for our material and calculation. We did lots of experiments and we find the material of the brush we wanted to install first is not solid enough to swipe the ice off. We tried several brush and finally we found the good material for our brush. After getting the right material, we started to measure the force and we got the normal force is between 4-6 lbs and resultant force is around 8 lbs. After the experiment, we discussed about our design and started to work on the cad drawing and manufacturing plan. Ice-breaker wanted to finish the first draft for our gate review 1 before next Monday and then we will have enough time to revise and develop our report and finish it in perfect like last time. Go ice-breaker!!

Challenges - Ivan Manuel

At this point, we found a lot of challenges in preceding our project. The biggest one I think is making a solidworks CAD model since none of us are really expert on it, and still need to do online tutorial in making one. We are also still unsure of how the device would look like, what kind of actuator would we use (DC motor or dynamo kit), where to locate each components, and so on. Second, is doing the testing experiment in determining the best rotational movement. Some group members think a rotating head brush just like an electric toothbrush would work best, while the others pitch an idea of making a bunch of fin on the stick handle which rotates and hit the ice on the screen perpendicularly. However, it was intuitively decided that this second method has a higher risk of damaging the windshield, and therefore its not being pursued any further.  The third challenge would be synchronizing the GR3 activities, since one activity need to wait for the other activity to be completed.

Future Plan - Yaqi Huang

Based on the experiment we did this week, we decided to use deicer liquid first to loose the ice and then use brush to clear the windshield. Also we decided the motion of the brush was rotation. The next step is to do another experiment by a force sensor to detect the force the brush needed. Once the force is decided, the motor can also be chosen. The next week we will focus on the CAD and the paper work for the Gate Review 3. For the CAD part, we need to do the 3D model as well as engineering drawings. With the engineering drawings, we can make manufacture plan. The plan will help us to produce the product in the next stage. For the paper work, we will do some calculations to show why the product was designed like that and give more details about the product.

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 7

Project status - Chee Wee Lee

On Thursday we just got back our Gate review 2 report and it was surprisingly awesome as compared to our gate review 1 which we did very badly. It was a huge improvement - from an C to an A! (and I heard our report got the best score in class. yayyy!) It is indeed a good motivator for us, as all our hard work finally paid off (we spent days to edit the report!). Beside the report, we did a meeting to discuss about the next step for our project too. First of all, we discussed about the mechanism of the device we are going to produce, and the way of doing it. Basically our device divided into 4 parts: the physical body of device, mechanical mechanism to drive the device, electrical circuit and battery to provide energy to the device and the user usability of device. So our group sort of divided into groups to work on the few things mentioned above, and planning to meet again on Monday to combine the results/data that we get. Also, we are planning to buy a sheet of glass for testing in a man-made winter condition to prove the calculation/theories that we found. And the next would be fixing all the error we found during the testing to produce the ideal product for our project.

Existing/interesting finding – Ziwei Xie

In this week, we got feedback from GateReview2 which was a big encourage to the whole team. Under every member’s hard work, we finally made a big improvement from GateReview1. It encouraged me a lot. During Thursday meeting, we discussed a lot of design details like the motor methods, charge methods, handles and so on. We found that if we use chargeable battery in our product, it would be convenient but cost too much. A regular chargeable toothbrush costs about 20 dollars. However, we decide the price of our product to be around 15 dollars. Chargeable battery turns not to be our solution. Also, we found out another electric toothbrush moving in a trace of “Z” while it was working. That was a useful finding as if we can make use of it, it will definitely improve our deice efficiency.

Challenge - Yaqi Huang

After Gate Review 2, we are moving to a new

stage. At this stage, we need to figure how the force we need to break ice. Soright now, the first challenge for us is to make ice. Since the weather is notcold enough, we need to use freezer to make ice on glass. Then some sensorsneed to be used to find out the force. Once the maximum or minimum forces aredecided, the motor can also be decided. So the second challenge for us is to dosome literature research about the bending moment and how to decide the motorbased on force. After this we can figure out what kind of material should weuse and what motor should we choose. Another challenge for us is to use CAD tomake model in a week. It will take a lot of time.

Future Plan - Ivan Manuel

"After receiving the good news from GR2 grade, we continue to focus on our future plan, and start dividing up the task right after Thursday class. We are planning to do the testing stage as soon as possible, in which Steven is responsible of buying the testing 0.5” thick glass, and Yaqi will buy the de-icer liquid from nearest store. Ivan already set up a meeting with Prof. John Luntz for any initial testing advice, and for access to the environmental chamber as well as force sensors. However, he has asked us to do some preliminary testing before hand, try to find a way to produce a nice layer of ice on the glass, test the de-icer liquid using a regular sprayer bottle, and also to test various brushes to see what works on the ice. On the other hand, Zi Wei will work on the device handle aesthetic design for best user experience. Optimization, motor selection, electrical, and mechanical integration, will be calculated by Steven, Yaqi, Queenie, and Chee-Wee respectively."

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 6

Our project status - Qiongyu Lou

We just finished our Gate Review 2. We made tons of effort on it so that I was mostly satisfied with our presentation and report. For the report, we divided all the activities into six parts and each of us take responsibility for one part. We held a meeting and discussed about all the activities ahead of doing them separately. We had hard time to finish the functional decomposition. We cannot understand it thoroughly at first time. After being helped by professor Brei and John, we figured it out. For the concept tree, we had limited brainstorming at first time . Finally, we got 26 products on our concept tree. We also did lots of work on our sketch. Ziwei is from school of information, and she is good at product interface design, which makes our sketch look really nice. Since we did bad in our last report, we make an appointment with sweetland and we let them look over our report. All of us review our report and tried to make it logical. Since we are not native speaker, we practiced many times to make the presentation go smoothly.

For revising Gate Review 1, each of us revise our own part and cheewee go over the whole part. I think it is really helpful to go over the gate review one, which provide us more ideas and clear our shortness.

Existing/interesting finding - Steven Kung

While we used the foam to build up our prototype in the assembling room, we found that maybe combining two or three different types of material for brush will work well during the process of removal. Since the traditional brush might be too soft to scrape off the ice, we can use plastic or something harder to attach with the brush. Thinking of the wear of brush through continuing scrapping, we can create a replaceable brush for customers to enhance the life cycle of the product. Also, a rechargeable battery will be installed in the bottom of the handle so that customers don’t need to spend extra money buying the battery. Working like an electrical brush, the bottom base of our product can be unplugged out and then put it on the recharger in the house or on the car.

Challenges - Chee Wee Lee

Before going into the challenges we are facing in our project, I would like to say everyone did a great job for presentation and also the gate review 2. I suppose we did way better than previous gate review because we spent even more time on it. As for the challenges we are facing in our project, I personally think that we should really analyze what we did and what we missed out. For example, the concept that we have just chosen (electric ice brush), we did not actually take into account a certain issues, such as the ways to power the device and the brush material. Both of the issues are very important as they determine whether the tool is successful or not. It is ideal that the device can be powered by a battery that can last at least a few cleaning cycle before recharging it again. Also, the material for the brush is crucial as it determines whether the brush can effectively remove the layer of ice on the windshield or not. I suppose all these are the issues that we need to be focused on in the next step of this project.

Figure Plan - Ziwei Xie

During this week, we finished GateReview2 and did the presentation in class. In GateReview2, we generated five top concepts and analyzed them. Finally, we chose electric de-ice brush to be our approach. And from the feedback of in-class presentation, there are a lot of things need to do next. We need to do research on de-ice liquid and figure out one product to combine with our electric brush. We need to go into details for product design like how big the brush should be, how long it will take to charge our product and the motor design. Also, as shown in the syllabus, we will do the financial plan and so on to prepare for GateReview3. Although, there are a lot of things need to do in the near future, we feel passionate. Go blue! Go ice-breaker!

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 5

Our Product Status (Yaqi Huang)

This week we did a lot work on the project. Everyone is hard working. First of all, each member votes to pick up the top five ideas. And we made a design matrix with that five ideas and the datum. Through the design matrix we decided our final concept. It is hard to decide. We have 12 ideas, and we love everyone. So based on the results of matrix we combine some concepts. Our final concept is based on electronic teeth brush. Then we did function decomposition to make every parts of the product clear. According to the function decomposition, our product will have two independent systems, “scrubbing ice” and “spraying deicer liquid”. Basically the idea is once a button is pressed the electric energy will transfer to mechanical energy. And the Mech. Energy will start the rotation and vibrating motion of the brush. And there will be another button on the product. Once you press that the button, the deicer liquid will be sprayed. What’s more, we are building the prototype right now. Although we haven’t finally done it, we already have the picture in our mind. And we are looking forward to our prototype.

Another thing for our team, we made norms. As time going, there is a little conflict in our team. So to make everyone happy we made some regulations:

Everyone should focus during lecture

No Michigan time, but maximum of 10 min tolerance

Everyone should speak English even we are Asian team

Get the task assigned done on time

Improve the communication. Keep the report consistency

Pay attention to the group meeting

Editing report together

Interesting Finding (Ivan)

This week we meet up with professor Luntz to talk about our project ideas. Other than the initial 12 methods we discover, he actually mentioned about hydrophobic liquid that we can integrate for our car cover and/or blanket ideas. This liquid is actually on the market already right now with a product name called neverwet. It was meant to be applied for daily life utilities such as preventing shoes from mud or rain water, farming gloves, and so on. Looking at the promotional video, it actually looks preety convincing.

However, the team think this solution is too easy and not too mechanical-ish, so we proceed

with our oversize electric rotating toothbrush concept and thus pitch this idea to prof. luntz

again. He gave us inputs about using both plastic and brush for the rotating head for a more

efficient result. We also agree to put a sprayer and a small tank (about 0.5 L) in the brush

handle for deicer liquid application. We are planning to install two switch/button on the handle in

which one will turn on the rotating motor, while the other will spray the liquid. We will see how

good our design later in the week. 

Challenge (Queenie) 

In this week, we did a lot of work and suffered a lot of challenge as well. We finally moved to the making decision stage. It is really hard for us to just pick one idea. We have initial 12 ideas and they are our idea so that it is really hard for us to just pick one idea and develop it. We met several times and tried to vote on our initial ideas and finally we got our direction. Another hard time I need to mentioned is we got our feedback for GR1. We paid tons of attention and did tons of work for GR1 but the result wasn't shown as our expectation. Our grammar and the way of expression are weak. Our English is our biggest weakness. We are kinda sad because we can't show to people what we did. We had a low time because of the result of GR1. However, we believe we can come over this difficult as a strong determined Asian group.  For GR2, we will send our report to Sweetland to revise it and we also plan to let every group member to proof-read instead 3 members proof-reading at GR1. Go Ice-breaker!!

Future Plan (Steven)

In this week, our team spends a lot of time completing the activities for GR2. We finish the functional decomposition, concept sketch, and concept scoring matrices, etc. By next Thursday, there are three important issues to finish, building alpha prototype, GR2 proofreading, and GR1 revision. Two of our teammates will go to the design lab 1 making the prototype by hands, and the others will help do the GR2 proofreading again and again to ensure that we won't face too many grammar errors as GR1. For GR1 revision, we will take it to sweetland and revise it ASAP. Hope we can do a good job in GR2 ~

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 5

Our Product Status (Yaqi Huang)

This week we did a lot work on the project. Everyone is hard working. First of all, each member votes to pick up the top five ideas. And we made a design matrix with that five ideas and the datum. Through the design matrix we decided our final concept. It is hard to decide. We have 12 ideas, and we love everyone. So based on the results of matrix we combine some concepts. Our final concept is based on electronic teeth brush. Then we did function decomposition to make every parts of the product clear. According to the function decomposition, our product will have two independent systems, “scrubbing ice” and “spraying deicer liquid”. Basically the idea is once a button is pressed the electric energy will transfer to mechanical energy. And the Mech. Energy will start the rotation and vibrating motion of the brush. And there will be another button on the product. Once you press that the button, the deicer liquid will be sprayed. What’s more, we are building the prototype right now. Although we haven’t finally done it, we already have the picture in our mind. And we are looking forward to our prototype.

Another thing for our team, we made norms. As time going, there is a little conflict in our team. So to make everyone happy we made some regulations:

Everyone should focus during lecture

No Michigan time, but maximum of 10 min tolerance

Everyone should speak English even we are Asian team

Get the task assigned done on time

Improve the communication. Keep the report consistency

Pay attention to the group meeting

Editing report together

Interesting Finding (Ivan)

This week we meet up with professor Luntz to talk about our project ideas. Other than the initial 12 methods we discover, he actually mentioned about hydrophobic liquid that we can integrate for our car cover and/or blanket ideas. This liquid is actually on the market already right now with a product name called neverwet. It was meant to be applied for daily life utilities such as preventing shoes from mud or rain water, farming gloves, and so on. Looking at the promotional video, it actually looks preety convincing.

However, the team think this solution is too easy and not too mechanical-ish, so we proceed

with our oversize electric rotating toothbrush concept and thus pitch this idea to prof. luntz

again. He gave us inputs about using both plastic and brush for the rotating head for a more

efficient result. We also agree to put a sprayer and a small tank (about 0.5 L) in the brush

handle for deicer liquid application. We are planning to install two switch/button on the handle in

which one will turn on the rotating motor, while the other will spray the liquid. We will see how

good our design later in the week.

Future Plan (Steven)

In this week, our team spends a lot of time completing the activities for GR2. We finish the functional decomposition, concept sketch, and concept scoring matrices, etc. By next Thursday, there are three important issues to finish, building alpha prototype, GR2 proofreading, and GR1 revision. Two of our teammates will go to the design lab 1 making the prototype by hands, and the others will help do the GR2 proofreading again and again to ensure that we won't face too many grammar errors as GR1. For GR1 revision, we will take it to sweetland and revise it ASAP. Hope we can do a good job in GR2 ~

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 4

Our project status (Chee Wee Lee)

Few days ago we just got back our Gate Review 1, to us the grade is very discouraging because we spent quite a lot of time on it. From the feedback we got from Prof Brei, our main problem is actually not so much of the technical stuff, but our grammars. Now that we know our major problem, we should focus more to improve the quality of our report. To do that, everyone in our group might need to do proofreading a few times to effectively identify errors in the report, and then try to rectify all our grammar mistakes as well as improving the consistency of our report. To my surprise, all the parts in the report is very inconsistent. I am very surprise just because of the fact that we discussed and finalized most of the things before we started writing the report, but seems that few of our team member is not paying attention at all during our discussion, which is something we should work on. Besides, this week we have started another stage of our project, which is conceptualization, where we started to brainstorm ideas to attack our problem statement. It did not go so well as our team could not think out of the box. Personally I think we not uncreative, but the fact that we worry too much about whether the ideas are workable or not, makes us stuck in the box. We should really go talk to more people, especially our technical coach in order to gain more innovative ideas for our project. Lastly, we just had a group meeting on Friday. We discussed our problem in GR1 and tried to solve them, and also kind of distribute the work for the activities related to GR2, and then we planned to meet again on Monday to start working on the report together.

Exciting/interesting Finding (Ziwei Xie)

In this week, Gate Review 1 is returned. We get a lot of feedback from professor and other teams. Yesterday, we had a group meeting to discuss our shortcomings in Gate Review 1 and potential improvements that we can make in the future. During the meeting, a very good findiug was that we finally decided to focus on ice and snow issue on the car before driving. And, we will mainly deal with reducing time in moving ice and snow into around 5 minutes. This conclusion is gathered from our survey. At first, we try to set people aging from 50 – 70 to be our user group. However, from our survey, as we mainly focusing on reducing time, people aging from 30 – 40 present much more interested in our product, because they are in a hurry to drive to work everyday morning and they do care about the time and effort they need to pay. Besides, those people have ability to pay for our product.

Some more interesting findings occur in our brainstorming. We come out more than ten approaches like blowers, ice defrosting materials, moving robot and so on. One of our group members proposed an idea based on electric toothbrush. We are thinking about whether we can make a bigger device just like electric toothbrush, moving and cleaning the ice by itself. Users only need to charge it in the night. We get a lot of exciting ideas during our meeting. I do love this kind of working atmosphere.

Challenges (Yaqi Huang)

This week we got the feedback for the Gate Review 1. Now we move to the Gate Review 2. In the stage of GR2, we started to think about solutions. Each of us drew a rough idea on a blank paper and then shared with all the team members. After a discussion, we found all the rough ides had some common things. We all wanted to apply the deicer liquid to the product at somewhere. Also we’d like to use the techniques such as vibrating, heating or blowing somewhere.. And right now, we still want to do the brainstorming. We need to generate some other fresh ideas for our design. After we collected some basic ideas, the next challenge for us is to know about all the techniques. For example, how long it needs to take to melt ice by using the vibrating method. How long will it take to melt ice if we combine the heating and deicer liquid. We will study for these techniques. And in next week, we will bring this information to our technical coach. We will discuss and to see which idea is workable, which one is not. 

Future Plan (Ivan Manuel Gunawan)

After receiving our GR1 review feedback, we all agree that we need to work harder on our next Gate review and improve our English skill in our report writing. So right now we are preparing GR2 ahead of time to make sure we have the chance to review the report altogether. We set up a meeting this Friday (10/04) and start out with dividing up the work for GR2 activities among team members, and set next Monday (10/07) as our activity due date. We were also trying to be innovative in generating more solution ideas, think outside the box, and pulling whatever ideas we have on a paper without thinking too much on its technical details, just yet. Ivan and Yaqi agreed to meet coach on Monday and try to ask about the possibility of these ideas.

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Refection - Week 3

GO! ICE - BREAKER

Our project status (Steven Kung)

This week, our group spent every day completing paper report for GR1 and making power point for in-class presentation. Since we have received almost 80 correspondents from our survey, the first task for us is to analyze all the data we need and accumulate those numbers into charts to observe the habits and feeling of our correspondents. Our second version questionnaire, which we added to 15 questions to cover every aspects, really provide us a great opportunity to study each elements in GR1. Using the data for age and user experience, we can easily build up a market research and persona/scenario to help us proceed our next step, such as designing characteristics of products. Also, by creating QFD table, we can translate customer requirements into technical description which makes us know, for customers, what the most important characteristic is and which characteristic we can neglect. To complete competition analysis and market value proposition, we search a lot of information for snow/ice removal products on Amazon or eBay. Compared the price and function of existing product with our survey, we can induce a product characteristic table for our design, which explains well about our product value and characteristic. Thanks to GR1, we can know deeper about our design direction and are happy to proceed our next step.

Exciting/interesting finding (Qiongyu Lou)

This week we finished gate review one and first presentation. I feel that we made a great work which makes me feel excited. At first, I think we will have a rough time because we aren’t native speaker and we might not be able to express in right way during paper writing and in-class presenting. However, we did a great job at presentation, and feedbacks from classmates are variety. I feel that our group started to know each better since we share same background and we all have passion to make this project perfectly as teammates.

There is a milestone. I used to form team with American classmate, even sometime we share different thoughts, but I still feel the project can be successful because they have better expression with professor. After this team formation, I feel in different way because we as a team can talk to each other in a more clear way sometime in same native language that really helps the communication within and helps us come up a better idea based on all of our thoughts.  

This time, I feel that the power as a team is really great and it does easy to get used to each others’ work style.

I love our team.

Challenges (Ziwei Xie)

At first, we identified drivers who suffer cold winter to be our user group. At that time, we didn’t think too much about subdividing user group or focus on certain feature to meet certain user group’s meet. We just think removing ice on car in the winter should be a problem and decide to work on it. However, after doing interviews, survey, market research, competition analysis and market value evaluation, we discussed our ideas with Pro. Brei. She gave us a very important suggestion to focus on old people. For old people, on one hand, standing in cold winter wind and snow is easy to cause them sick; on the other hand, their energy limitation contributes their need. Besides, they can afford this kind of products. So we decide to follow Pro. Brei’s suggestion and change our user group into old people aging from 50 – 70. The challenge is that we already conducted our survey, and it was based on our friends aging from 20- 30. We might need to redo a survey to figure out our new user group’s need.

Another challenge might be, in the next step, designing the product. What kind of solution can we provide to user? We have several ideas before, like using an automatically cover, adding deforesting materials to wipers. Next week, we need to focus on solution and feature design. Focusing on reducing time and make the process automatic. 

Future Plan (Chee Wee Lee)

Now that we have just done with Gate Review 1 and presentation, I suppose we should do a reflection session to revise everything that we just did. For example our problem statement, although we had changed it a few times, it should be more specific according to professor, to be able to tackle the problem more effectively. Besides that, we will be having a regular weekly meeting with our coach to discuss what are the problem we are having in our Gate Review 1. On the other hand, this coming week we will be having another meeting with our Professor Brei to talk about the Gate review 1 as well, and also our coming plans. On a side note, maybe we should organize some dinner party to enhance our team bonding and our communication :D

ICE - BREAKER Weekly Refection - Week 2

Our Project Status (Ivan Manuel Gunawan)

In our second week, we begin our progress by setting up a quick meet on Sunday (9/15/2013) to brainstorm some more ideas and problem statement that we might want to pursue. There were a few problem statement being pitched in, such as:

1. Risk of accident happening to car passenger when opening the car door in a highly traffic city with lots of motorcycle users.
2. Damage to car power window electricity system due to rain drops which fall inside the car when the window is opened.
3. Raising the driver’s awareness of the car surroundings while driving, by installing camera on the sides and rear part of the car and display it on the speedometer space.
4. Making a more efficient car bumper which can absorbs impact during car collision.
5. Car light issue at night which often distracts the other drivers viewing capability.

However, after thinking ahead and doing a quick poll on each ideas, we decided to stick on our car and snow problem statement like discussed in 1st week meetings. We also managed to divide up the task we need to do for GR1-activities list, specifically for number 1 – 3 just because we haven’t got any lecture for the rest of the activity at that point of time.

We also discuss about some strategy and topics we want to discuss with Coach Sou before our scheduled meeting with her on Monday (9/16/2013).  We expanded our problem statement ideas in car and snow into 2 different part:

1. Problem with car and black ice in winter slippery road.
2. Reducing time taken to shoveling off the snow from the car surface.
3. Wiper that can breaks the freezing ice on the front window panel of the car which often blocks the driver’s sight.

Our meeting with Sou went pretty well, except knowing that we have a lot more to discuss within a short 20 mins timeslot given. She started the meeting telling us about “why” and “Duncker” diagram which was really helpful for us to composing our problem statement.  She also kindly provide us with the correct problem statement template to make sure we are doing it right. Before the meeting ends, she told us to send her our composed survey questions that we have made earlier, and then she will help us to correct it.

During our Tuesday class time period, we also managed to split up the job to complete “GR1-Product definition” list. We have set Monday (9/23) to be our deadlines to submit all our partial documents and then start making the report and presentation together.

Exciting/interesting finding (Yaqi Huang)

Gate Review 1 is approaching, which means a lot work should be done in this week. We met a lot and an interesting thing happened. A very good translator appeared in our team. Since we all know Chinese except Ivan. Some time when we argued in Chinese, Cheewee would translate to Ivan automatically. Another fun thing was that after a-week discussion we went back and chose the first topic we had. And this topic is about how we got our team name. what’s more, I made a questionnaire with Steven. This was first time I made a questionnaire. It was cool to design different questions, talk to people and collect information. During the discussion, I even had some new ideas of the solution. Like a circular machine can stick on the window, and move automatically to clean the snow. I feel like I am a detective. Through the talk, I can collet and sum up the information I wanted. Everyone in our team are preparing for the design, for the GR1. We all aim at the same target. That made me feel powerful and awesome.

Future Plan (Qiongyu Lou)

After whole week meeting, we finally decided our launching project as we planned and design a questionnaire. We are starting to send them out and promote our questionnaire. Hope we can get feedbacks from the market by the middle of next week. After collecting these feedback, we will analyze and come up with a more practical solution that can meet all the requirements from the voice of market. In addition, we will also analyze several key attributes from the current solution and decide the most important features for our product to be used and to be developed. Besides those market and customer research, we will also read some patents and literatures to be referenced.

Challenge (Steven Kung)

After our meeting with Coach Sou, we found that we need to define a more specific and detailed problem description to help out design our product. During the first meeting, our team members are all struggling with what products we should design or how function we should include; however, we ignore the fact that product design should stem from customers’ need. Thanks to Coach’s pointing out, although we try to make a questionnaire that looks like cover all the information we want, it turns out the questions we ask lack of deep and detail information, such as color preference, safety issue, etc. Since next week is the due for GR1, we really need a lot of survey data result to build up the QFD table. And the most difficult problem we face is that how can we get the information from manufacture and marketing? If we don’t come up with a real product, how can we ask the manufacturing and marketing people to give us feedback? For me, if I am a sales guy, I don’t know how to market my product if it does not exist…so as the manufacturer……

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Refection - Week 1 - We are ready!

Hey, this is our team. We are ICE-BREAKER.
We have five team members from ME, who are super smart and creative, and one team member from SI who is good at graphic design and user research. We plan to solve a problem in cars, although, at this point, we have not decided what exactly it is. We are in design. 
Go blue! Go IEC - BREAKER!

Our Project Status (Ziwei Xie)
The landmark of this week is that we formed a team and we narrowed our topic into one problem in cars. We held group meetings on this Monday (Sep. 9th) and this Thursday (Sep. 12th). We discussed a lot about the topic. By far, we mainly have had two ideas. One is about the snow and the car as it takes quite a long time to defrost the ice and snow on the car. We all have a hard time in the cold winter wind shoveling snow on our cars, specifically Ann Arbor has such a long winter. The other idea is about reckless drivers as driving for a longtime is boring and easy to feel tried. Reckless is not safe for drivers, which is certainly a problem for most drivers. However, we researched the market and found out for both of these two topic, there are already maturely products solving them.By far, we have not decided what our problem/topic is. We decided to talk with our friends and ask them what problems bother them while driving. And then, we will have a meeting tomorrow night to choose two problems from them and finally decide our problem.

Exciting/ interesting finding (Chee Wee Lee)

First of all, I would like to mention a fun fact about our group – we are all Chinese ethnically, though some of us don’t speak Chinese language. This is really cool, considering we are from all around the world and various background. Back to our group project and discussion, we had a couple of meetings and we have gotten quite some work done. During our meetings, our discussion mainly revolved around the topic or problem that we should be focusing on in our project. It turned out that we have chosen a general topic which is related to automobile. We then narrowed down the problem statement to focusing on a certain issues – ice/snow on vehicle, reckless driver and vehicle safety. In the midst of discussion, we thought of tons of solutions to the issues we selected, which by now we should know we did wrongly, because we are supposed to come up with the issues we have, instead of the solutions. But most of were very surprised by the latest technology install in the newest vehicle. We kind of found out tons of interest stuff in vehicle by exchanging the experience we have had in our personal or friend’s vehicle, because most of us have been in different cars, ranging from a normal sedan to a luxurious premium vehicle. For instance, one of us talked about a futuristic GPS which projects onto the windshield, which is something we normally see in an action movie. It is amazing that all these unexpected technology is actually achieved in our real life. On a side note, I personally thought myself as very outdated in terms of the latest technology, and that I should update myself from time to time. Also, it was a very fun and exciting conversations I had with my team members.

Challenges (Ivan manuel gunawan)

So after doing all those brainstorming during our first meeting, we went to Prof. Brei to consult about our ideas. However, she says that we are doing the projects wrongly. We should think about the problems first, and don’t think about solution just yet. With that being said, we continue the discussion talking about our two possible problem definition, which was car and snow, or reckless driving in car especially sleepy and drunk driving. Narrowing it down to these two, she suggest us to just focus on the car and snow topic, since it seems that the solution would involve more mechanical engineering type of work, and that reckless driving problem might lead us to a more electrical field. She also adds that car companies are already doing a lot of research and solution on the reckless driving part, which leave us less room to provide new innovative ideas.

Talking about our proposed solution with the linkages and automatic / portable car cover, she raised another problem saying that it was too simple to be done by a group of 5 Mechanical engineers and 1 school of information grad student. She was proposing to implement more thermodynamics solution such as blower, heater, or other stuff.
Other than that, I was also doing research on those snow car cover, and snow removal device on the internet, and found out that people already thought about a very similar concept that I had in mind, and they have actually had a physical product ready to go to the market since 3 years ago as I looked from their youtube videos.
So thinking about these challenges, we might have to come up with more innovative ideas if we want to stick with car and snow problem. Or, we might have to think about some other issues with automotive world which we also talked as a group during our meeting last Thursday, 9/12/2013. Another possible breakthrough that we can do is by thinking more critically about other issues outside automotive world. Getting ideas from the patent list I believe would also help us to generate more creative ideas and solve our current challenges.

Future Plan(Yaqi Huang)

At this moment, we still haven’t decided the direction of our project. So during the weekend, each team member will talk to their friend who drives a car to find which part of the car they don’t satisfy with. Then we will meet at Sunday and listen to each other’s opinion to choose some workable directions. After that we will officially begin our research. Some of us are going to make a questionnaire and ask people to do it. At the same time, the others are going to do the literature research about such a topic. Based on the survey and the literature information, we can narrow down the direction. This is the plan for the following week. Once the direction is decided, we will start the brainstorm to create a solution.