I enter this week with lots of excitement, as I am hoping both my teams will make significant progress in the projects and that I continue my learning of the engineering design process, as well as skills that I have outlined in previous posts. Over this past weekend, I did absolutely nothing for the internship, which felt good, but I was definitely ready to get back into the swing of things.

Monday

NO WORK TODAY!! Juneteenth was today, which allowed me to do some serious reflection on what the holiday is about and the history surrounding it.

Tuesday

Today had many successes!!!! (After a couple failures). Our gastric team actually managed to get the suction pump working, which was a process, but a huge win overall. Parnika, Diya, and I started the morning by splitting duties up; I took charge of finalizing and formatting our design criteria and Diya and Parnika finished up the electronics and hooked up the batteries to the motor and the “solenoid”. Once this occurred, I finished my bit and the motor (and thus the pump) started working. We then quickly connected the tubing necessary and stuck the salem sump tube in a “stomach” (water bottle). We got initially excited when the water started pumping into the holding vessel, but then quickly realized that when the motor turned off for the intermittent suctioning we wanted, the water in the tubes started backflowing. After speculating on this and wodering why our “solenoid valve” wasn’t working, we refreshed with lunch, and, an hour and a half later, realized that the “solenoid” was actually an air valve and that the current vessel was cracked, which caused the backfl0w. By switching out the vessel and completely removing the air valve, we fixed the issue and the pump worked beautifully!! We then convened on what we needed to do next and then moved on to smaller group projects. Mine, there was not much to do as Janie and I are still waiting on the parts to come in so that we can make the prototype to start testing. So, today was a good day in my book :))

Wednesday

Today was very exciting because the first two international interns came into town, Chifuniro and Abubakr. I met them last night as Nothando and I got them situated in their rooms and showed them a little of Martel college, where they are staying. Today, when they woke up, we took them to the OEDK, then showed them campus as we took them to North Servery for food. This was very fun, especially when we showed them the whispering walls at Herzstein Hall, they liked that a lot. After the food, we went to RUPD for their ID’s, and through a series of events (and 2.5 busrides), we got their IDs. Shortly after this, they were tired, understandably, so we took them back to Martel and headed back to the OEDK.

My biggest takeaway for today is that I need to be better about emailing all people involved when composing emails. This is an “area of growth for the summer” (Eleanor, 2:30pm today), and I agree wholeheartedly with her. Other than this, today we had a brainstorming session for the Gastric team, which went well, and we setup everything to dive fully into the brainstorming and screening process for the rest of the week. For the Haptics, we finished our testing matrix and did reading on the material sent from Grant. All in all a good day, can’t wait for tomorrow.

Thursday

We made big moves today after we had our big brainstorming session today for Team PuMPED, sitting 30 minutes with sticky notes and grinding out idea after idea. Personally, this is one of my favorite parts of the engineering design process. Following this, we sorted the different ideas into design blocks and then I created our template for our morph chart. Something that I didn’t realize for this summer is that my spreadsheet skills would improve. I spent about 3.5 hours today creating and formatting our charts and matrices for design criteria comparison, morphing, screening, scoring, and proxies. Today was also the first day that Abubakr and Chif were at the OEDK for a full day, and it was nice having them there, it felt even more comfy and it was nice to work next to them in person.

Janie and I continued waiting for parts for the Haptics project, but we did get reading on how to setup and code the parts coming in, so we did that reading and comprehension of those parts. I also finished our testing plan for the last test of our project, and documenting this was a little tiresome, but necessary. I also made progress in finding tickets for everyone for the Houston Dash game we would like to go to, so that was nice 🙂

Friday

FRIDAY HEHEHE!! Today was honestly (besides the last 30 minutes of the day) the most efficient and productive day I’ve had so far.  Parnika and I started the day by meeting with Precious and explaining the morphing process following my creation of the morph chart. Before this, I forgot to add, Parnika and I ranked our design criteria using a comparison chart, which will help us down the road when we score our ideas. You might be wondering, where was Diya today? Well, Diya had an Organic Chemistry exam, so we only saw her in the afternoon. After meeting with Precious, we had a quick but very useful workshop on Evaluating Solutions, given by Dr. Hunter. Following this, Parnika and I morphed 20/25 ideas together, leaving the last 5 for Precious. Following a quick lunch with fellow intern Megan, Nothando, Chif, Abubakr, and I went to H&D to fix their swipe cards and then headed back to the OEDK. For the rest of the afternoon, I worked on finishing the proxy and scoring matrix templates, and once Diya showed up, we created our proxies. I also started to code the API for the Haptics project. I finished the very end of the day with playing BANGERS while on AUX, putting (hopefully) everyone in a good mood for the rest of their Friday.

All in all a good week, and they seem to keep getting better, so let’s keep that trend moving.

Til next week,

Mina