Hello!  Week 2 of SEED is almost finished, and I feel in the flow of things.

My last blog was published last Thursday, and a lot has happened since then. On the following Friday, my team for the Zoo’s Red River Hog feeding enrichment device moved on from brainstorming. In just one day we went through the entire process of screening, arriving at 6 possible solutions, then scoring those solutions.  Both the number one and the number two options from scoring were leagues ahead of the others, but we decided to go with #2 factoring in the hog’s smartness and the novelty of #2.  Luckily enough, this was the idea that I was most excited about, “Tire Inception”! Over Monday and Tuesday we built low and medium fidelity prototypes of the feeder and then tested it.

This turned out very well, and the food escaped from the PVC pipe into the tires, then out through the holes in the tire. The expected feeding time when testing was way more than we had expected, but it seems like if we carry forward with this design then we can poke more holes in the tire to fix that problem. At the end of Tuesday we sent a short video of our prototype in, and will eventually get feedback on our ideas.

On Wednesday we got our summer-long projects, and I ended up with my #1 choice, “Take a Breather”.  This is a project that focuses on automating BVMs (Bag Valve Masks) to run without any manual labor by a person, enjoying the benefits of the much more expensive ventilator without the cost.  We then spent all of Wednesday and today researching this topic by reading the previous team’s information.  The previous team was a CAPSTONE Senior Design team, so there is a year’s worth of extensive documentation on this project.  It has been a struggle starting to shift through this information, as I have not read technical documents for days on end before.  But it has been fun seeing what they did!

TAB Device Preview

Our team is called Lung-Lasting, and we’re building the Lung-Lasting Automatized Mechanical Assistance, or LLAMA for short.

We had a phone conference with a Rice professor, Dr Abidi, who was the advisor for the previous team.  In it, we identified that our team’s goal for this project is to find a better motor system and cooling system to improve the run-time of the device, as well as improve the durability of the device to be able to withstand environmental factors such as heat, humidity, dust, and impacts.  As we had the client interview after only 3 hours of research I feel we were ill-prepared for it, but would realistically not have gotten much more out of the interview if we had had it later than we did.  We had enough time to barely understand the problem and start asking questions about it.

The biggest challenge this week has been reading the previous team’s research, as there is a large quantity of it to go thorough, with a lot of the information being repetitive or unnecessary for our team’s goals.  I’m excited for this project, and think that I can make a positive change in it. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ― Margaret Mead