Last Friday night about 7 of us got together to ride in Critical Mass – a very popular bike ride that happens once a month in Houston. There was over a thousand people flooding the streets of Houston. We were in for a treat. The ride ended up taking us 13 miles out towards 610 and 13 back to downtown. Most of us were not prepared for this ride, although we had no regrets. We had a recovery dinner at IHOP afterwards.
Critical Mass – Midway point
On Tuesday (4th of July), most of us SEED interns got together to eat food and watch fireworks. We ate Hamburgers and some dessert we had baked the day before. My vegan flan didn’t get to the right consistency and therefore it was more of a smoothie, so we couldn’t eat it. I’ll be blending it to make smoothies the following week. After eating and hanging out, we walked across the street to Herman park to watch the fireworks. It was very full and hard to find a place to sit. After playing a game of “apples to apples”, we decided to come back to Martel and watch the fireworks. The show was spectacular but short lived. Lasted 15 minutes.
SEED group in Hermann Park for 4th of July
On Wednesday, we got back to work. One of our team members (Carlos) was still in Minnesota, and our other team member (Charity) was feeling sick with a headache. Therefore there was only Tiwonge and I to work on testing and the Presentation.
Before I could run any tests, I found that the prototype stopped working again. It was again the process of diagnosing and soldering small chips back on. The boards are very delicate, and simply moving them around or touching the chips can seriously damage them. We will laser-cut a stencil out of kapton tape for future manufacturing of the board.
After fixing the board to working condition, we conducted some preliminary tests and recorded some results. The circuit board would keep on misbehaving, so the testing was slow and unstable. I spent more time fixing the connections on the board and soldering parts back on.
Testing setup
Today (Thursday) We welcomed back our other 2 group members that returned, (charity and Carlos). We worked with the presentation and made sure everyone knew what to talk about, and then we presented to the rest of the SEED interns and the OEDK staff.
The presentation made us realize how little we’ve done throughout the internship, at least compared with the other teams. The PCB board connections have been difficult to work with and have slowed us down a lot. The testing we have attempted to conduct has also been slow to perform. Our team acknowledged this after the presentation, and agreed that we need to work a little quicker and delegate tasks more effectively among one another.
I’m happy that we realized our difficulties as a team and realized ways to improve our productivity. I believe our team will be more devoted to working hard on this project to make it a reality by the end of the summer. With 3 weeks, the clock is ticking away, and we have a long way to achieve a large-scale manufacturing prototype that works reliably.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the project, and working more effectively with my peers.