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.