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.