This week has been quite the ride.

Starting and finishing our project for the Houston Zoo–an enrichment device for the okapi there–was quite the challenge in the 5 days (excluding the weekend) that we were given. My team (Team Tiger: Liz, Blessings, Luis, and myself) decided on making a hanging box with shelves that were to be pulled by the okapi’s tongue. In doing this, the food on top of the shelves would fall down, and the okapi could eat it. During the stages of low-fidelity prototyping, our teammate Blessings came up with an interesting idea, to have a carrot hold up the shelf, so that when the okapi ate the carrot(s) the food would fall, rather than them pulling on a handle. We rolled with this idea.

Unrelated to the okapi project, but at the beginning of the week, we had a Bajaj challenge, building a low-fidelity prototype of a 3 wheeled auto-rickshaw that would carry passengers and fly down a zip line without those passengers exiting the vehicle. I worked with Blessings on this project, and we took a proud 2nd place. We only lost to Jeremy ‘(our TA for the summer) because he cheated somehow, the method I have not yet discovered.

Moving forward with the idea, we prototyped a more-refined version of this solution. The accelerated pace of this project–all 7 steps of the Engineering Design Process–in 5 days is not something I ever really want do again. Our end-goal was to make the final prototype out of acrylic, but alas, we only got as far as a wooden box held together with tape and bolts for the other hardware in the device. We could only get one shelf to work, since we could only find one smaller hinge for our prototype in the OEDK. But aside from that, I’m very proud of Team Tiger and the solution we ended with.

The day we finished our ‘final’ prototypes, we also gave fairly short presentations to the rest of the SEED Squad to brief them on what our individual solutions are. Some solutions were definitely more complete than ours, but ours was still the best :^}.

Some sweet pics of our last enrichment prototype

On Wednesday, it finally happened. We filled out the Project Preference forms, and received our team and project assignments. I ended up on the Diabetic Foot Checker project, with Caz, Luis, and Chris. We are tasked with saving the world. We will accomplish this by creating a device that will allow patients, specifically patients with Diabetes, to check their feet for unwanted developments, such as cuts, blisters, ulcers and the like. After much deliberation, surveying, and Google searching, we decided on the team name: Foot for a King. Our official theme song is Footloose (a runner up in our naming deliberations), and I’m glad to say I will be attempting to annoy everyone with it at every chance I get.

On Thursday, we had a Needs Finding workshop, which focused on how engineers find problems that they then pitch to be solved. In order to generate empathy for the types of people we would potentially be helping, we had three challenges. The first was visual impairment, we walked around the OEDK blindfolded with a walking stick (with a partner who could see), and struggled to navigate this maze. The second was eating a bowl of Cheerios without being able to bend our elbows, and with our wrists bound in awkward positions. This was done to simulate the disorder arthrogryposis, where the afflicted can have a very limited range of movement and low dexterity in their extremities. The third, and usually the most memorable, as according to the speaker for the workshop, Dr. Ghosn, was getting around in a wheelchair. On paper it sounds easy, you have wheels right? Wrong. It was incredibly difficult to even get through the doors, which are fairly narrow. The hardest part was getting up the ramp in front of the building, which is considered shallow in comparison to some of the other absurd climbs that can be found in other places that are still ADA compliant. Getting up the ramp was greater difficulty for me (given I couldn’t use my legs) than a steep climb on a mountain biking trail. Just like Dr. Ghosn had explained to us earlier, it really is easy to overlook problems that you would think of as significant until you endure them yourself.

Unrelated to SEED Section! Yay!

I mentioned last week that I would tell you guys about my electric bike build. I have not forgotten my covenant. So, to begin I should explain a little of what I’m trying to accomplish with this project. To start, the greatest challenge was maintain all of my bike’s original drive train, so that the bike would still operate as a bike, with pedal power and all 21 gears as it came out of the box. Even so, I still wanted to be able to use those gear ratios to modulate how the power of my motor went into speed/torque. After quite a bit of research I came across a gem called a mid-drive electric bike, which utilized an extra chain ring on the front sprockets of the bike in order to allow the motor to drive the rear wheel. To prevent the pedals from going wild at higher speeds, I am using a freewheeling system, which is pretty much just a one way clutch that interfaces with pedals and the motor system.

I decided to move forward with a belt drive system for the powered part of my drive train, for the sake of less maintenance, and less sound, and it has surpassed in difficulty the original challenge of maintaining my drive train. I borrowed a TON of ideas from this channel on YouTube called ‘hutchtransfer’, and lots of other e-bike forums and builds. This week I finished my enclosure for my motor, installed the pulley and one way clutch onto my motor, mounted them, and all I need to do now is finish up my wiring, mount the battery, align the pulleys, remove the wobble, waterproof everything, make it look pretty, and test. Ez.

 

PS. I forgot to take a photo of what my bike looks like right now so I’ll be sure to include one next week!