10/19/2013

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!

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