Hello my 300 dolars high precision calipers no seriously I would love have one of those dear blog readers, my name is Eduardo Pagnoncelli Lorandi ( the famous human caliper ) and this week we… well, you guess.

Finally our project started taking some shape, after getting our hands on a broken Kasupe, we opened it and started looking for the sensors we could squeeze some data. The goal was to find the potentiometer connecter to the claw on the syringe bedding, that kept the syringe in place, and well, we found it! After toying with the Arduino, and some dirty wiring, I could get the data being outputted by the potentiometer, a great step for our project indeed!

After having the potentiometer output, we had to:

1. Measure syringes to build a data set
2. Create an algorithm that would get the potentiometer readout and convert to the syringe Outer Diameter.

The algorithm could not be created without the data set, so we started measuring the syringes we have, and also visiting the Rice Village Medical Center to buy syringes (cudos to Michael, who worked after 5:00pm on a Friday), and have more syringes to measure. Since we were aiming to a good, precise data-set, every single one on the group measured each syringe, to eliminate human error at maximum, that means everyone measured aprox. 30 syringes, with 4 different parameters, and being slowly and careful for a great result.

After the tedious measuring job, we had to find relations between the parameters we measured and the syringes Inner diameter, which resulted on countless hours of building graphs, analyzing them, researching the best methods to create relations between them (statistics, interpolation, linear regression …), but in the end, this week we learned a lot of these useful concepts, visualized which next steps should be taken, and got a more clear vision of how to achieve our desired goal.

Also, we had a 3D printing workshop, where the team printed a 3D Boat, an physical tribute for our catchphrase (that pretty much showed it’s meaning this week): Smooth seas don’t make good sailors!