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 ~
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