I’m just a ‘lil salty about having to leave Team Extra Salty.

Over the past week in SEED, we have been working in temporary teams for ENGI 120 Bootcamp. Each team was tasked with systematically working through the engineering design process to produce a final medium-fidelity prototype of a device intended to double the feeding time of a red river hog, Luna, at the Houston Zoo.

My team (Andrew, Chisomo, Novath, and myself) trudged through brainstorming, screening, and scoring to finally arrive at prototyping. Our final design concept was essentially a double salt-shaker. Two buckets are stacked on top of each other, each with holes in the bottom in a different configuration. Food pellets for the hog are placed in the upper bucket, the device is hung on the enclosure, and the hog would have to maneuver the pellets through both sets of unaligned holes before being able to eat.

Team Extra Salty thrived during prototyping. Together, we worked to resolve design flaws, drilled A LOT of holes in plastic, and just had a fun time. In the testing phase, we also got leg day in through our kick test to verify the long-feeding time for the hog. My legs still hurt, but our design was a success.

If Team Extra Salty had a few extra days and took a quick trip to The Home Depot, I strongly believe that we would have been able to produce a high-fidelity prototype, test it, and implement it in the Houston Zoo. Thus, my ‘lil saltiness. I think abandoning this project with the end so close and so attainable makes me uncomfortable.

On to better things and all, I suppose.

We received our permanent project and team assignments this week. For the next six weeks, I will be working to outfit the OEDK with a harmful-noise warning system alongside teammates Clement, Dylan, and Wilson. We eventually renamed our project Ringing the Decibels, after a half hour stint entertaining names from a band name generator including “Warning! at the Disco”, “Danny and the Loud Noise”, and “Bring Me the Sounds.” (Catch our band’s hit song This Love is Loud But It’s OEDK on Soundcloud, dropping this summer.)

Ringing the Decibels had our first client meeting with the illustrious OEDK Lab Technicians Danny and Fernando this morning. This meeting provided some great direction for our further research. Honestly, I’m enjoying the research so far; I never thought that one chapter on sound in AP Physics 2 would ever become this useful.

Additionally, this project works with a lot of the same concepts as some of the side projects I mentioned I wanted to pursue this summer in my previous post. My month of May spent researching random information on microcontrollers, LEDs, and microphones was apparently a fairly decent choice.

Now for the extra salt.

3D printers are finicky as heck.

My team spent the entire afternoon session trying to print ONE part from the previous designs. ONE. We spent THREE hours and had to abort five different prints. I was just informed that the printer finally started working a few minutes ago and that our part will be done tomorrow after lunch. A twenty-hour print. How splendid.

Jesus called me to be salt of the earth but right now I think I’m just salty.

I’ll work on that.