Week 5: Elephants and Rabbits

Howdy! Welcome to my reflection of my 5th week here as a SEED intern. For the most part, this week was very rewarding as we saw our device brought to life but equally frustrating as more moving parts means more chances of mishaps! In a completely unrelated metaphor I will explain later in this blog, our triumphs were Elephant sized and the mishaps before and after these triumphs are all rabbit sized.

Figure 2: Medium-High Prototype, to scale

We started the week with a medium fidelity prototype. We wanted this prototype to help us confirm that our chosen mechanism and the calculations behind it were true. To recap, our Ro-loop design should be able to sync a loop of film on two reels (essentially pulleys) moving horizontally and a syringe pumping out our emulsion vertically with a gear system. For these components we started off by going online to a gear manufacturer and pulling CAD files of these gears and converting them to an Adobe Illustrator file for laser cutting. We were also able to make our pulleys by gluing laser cut circles of two different sizes. A rack was also available to us through this online resource (khk gears) which we were also able to laser cut and use in our prototype. After some sanding to minimize friction on our gears, pulleys, and the dowels connecting everything we were able to actually see our mechanism functioning fully.

We then wanted to start testing on which material was the best for our applicator roller, and what better way to do so then to upscale our medium fidelity prototype to its full scale and start building our medium-high fidelity prototype. This where tedious aspects of our project came to fruition; where we fully understood that with each moving part we included, the higher the chance for more miscellaneous issues to arise. These included maintaining tension in our conveyor belts, minimizing friction, and making sure all of the teeth in our different gears align enough to maximize functionality. This took longer than anticipated as we are still in the process of finalizing this prototype. We hope to start testing pretty soon hopefully so we can decide on the material for our roller and move forward to our final prototype.

To explain the (awkward) metaphor used in my intro, I should bring up this week’s meta-cognition lesson on planning. We learned about planning to focus most of our time on the more important tasks, the Elephant tasks, and spending less but adequate time on the smaller tasks that don’t feed into the bigger, Elephant tasks. I think this was the best meta-cognition session we’ve had so far because I was able to come away with a lot in regards to how to effectively plan my days and tasks to use my time wisely. So from this lesson, I wanted to make use of the size disparity in the Elephants and Rabbits used as a metaphor in the lesson as a metaphor of our team’s week as a whole. The rabbits, small in size, were the small build up of frustration as some components of our device weren’t working the way we wanted them to and the Elephant, bigger in size, was the reward that came with seeing our device, even the smaller components, functioning well.

Until next week,

Mathias Adamu

 

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