THAT’S ALL HERE, RIGHT HERE ON TRIPLE C!

If you didn’t catch the sweet reference, I am alluding to the groundbreaking American classic, Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. This incredible show hosted by Guy Fieri is a good analogy to this week.

In the show I haven’t seen a scene that lasted more than 1.5 seconds, and everything seemed like it was on 2x speed. Much like my week, Triple D often leaves you with a sense of incompleteness that wants you longing for more, so you watch another 26 seasons of Guy shouting while shoving food into his mouth.

This same feeling of incompleteness, has left me wanting to continue this project and take it as far as I can. I won’t be able to work on it this fall semester, since I want to dedicate myself to my scary, first Bioengineering course, ‘Bioengineering Fundamentals’. As far as I can tell, I won’t have time to breathe air, let alone refine such a sweet project at that time. As I said earlier, Triple D has the fastest editing in the industry, and the entire run time of the show blurs past you. Much like episodes flow into each other, my days quickly muddled this summer as time blew past me.

Moving on from my mopey-ness from SEED ending, this week was pretty relaxing in terms of prototyping. We had already done a lot of prep work at the end of the previous week in terms of finishing the assembly, and so we kinda just threw everything in the box fairly quickly. The wood glue I tried to use on the box failed, likely because the oil finish of the wood sealed it and prevent the glue from bonding to it properly. So instead we used good ol’ superglue to glue all of the pieces of the enclosure together. After affixing the wooden box, we reassembled the electronic components inside the box (ie. re-soldering the switch and then putting the other stuff onto the walls of the box).

We then began testing, and the results are (mostly) satisfactory. We aced the safety and cleanability criteria, and our cost criteria. Currently our device is recorded as failing the detectability criteria, but after lots of discussion with our peers, mentors, and within our team, we’ve decided that the way we conducted the test may have been the issue. Other factors include a dirty foot plate and a slightly unfocused camera. But regardless of the results, I’m proud of the magical wedge we have created as a team.

On Wednesday, we presented the results of our work to the rest of the SEED squad, as well as a few visitors. I managed not to botch the intro this time like I did with the first presentation, so that was definitely a plus. I also managed to get a compliment from Carolyn Huff even after I accidentally kicked her as I tried to prevent a piece of plastic from falling to the ground (I’M SO SORRY MRS. HUFF). We proceeded to take an adorable team photo after the presentation, while we still looked fly.

Prior to Thursday we had started working on an instruction manual for our device, and it came it out pretty well as we polished it on Thursday. For the rest of the day I moped/reminisced, and power washed the loading dock. In addition to that, we all worked on creating adequate documentation on how the prototypes are assembled, and made build manuals.

Once more, I went mountain biking on Sunday, with Manuel, and somehow we managed to drag Jake along with us. (Jake is a high school senior who worked with us the whole summer with the Wheelchair transfer team). We had a jolly good time hitting the trails, and Manuel got lots of footage on his GoPro of us doing tricks and riding spooky features. The only issue, as it was with the last time, is that the camera makes everything that was expressly intense in-person look L A M E. After we left the trails, and started back biking to Rice, the only thing keeping me going was the hope of seeing some shweet footage when we made it back. Tragically the footage fails to capture the essence of the trail, so I’ve sort of given up on recording myself biking ever again.

This is the same feature I rode last week with Caz

 

It has been a true pleasure working for 300+ hours here in the Dungeon (The OEDK basement). Thanks for coming along on this wild ride. Critical mass is happening again, today, and you know for sure I’m going with the crew.

Signing off from SEED 2017,

Ya Boy Kelvin

 

PS. I had a tragic 3D printed part failure, so I can’t work on my bike until I get the component machined from aluminum.