Hi! I know this is a late introduction, but nonetheless, my name is Parnika Mandewalkar, and I’m an Electrical Engineering major! Fun fact: I’m the only ELEC from the Houston SEED interns in a sea of MechEs and BioEs, so I guess you could say I’m a precious commodity 🙂
For the summer, my two projects are a Gastric Suction Pump for neonatal babies in low-resource communities through Rice360 and a Bird Brooder through the Houston Zoo. I can’t wait to share updates about my progress throughout these projects and the program!
PuMPED
For a little introduction, my team for the Gastric Suction project consists of myself, Mina, Precious, and Diya, and we formed the team name as an acronym for our names! You may be wondering, why is the ‘u’ lowercase and the ‘E’ uppercase? Well we actually created a second acronym for our team name which makes PuMPED stand for Pediatric Motorized Portable Extraction Device (isn’t it genius??? it only took us a mere week of googling medical terminology to come up with).
In terms of where we are for this project, we have a prototype that the previous capstone team designed, and we’ve rebuilt and tested it in order to assess its strengths and weaknesses. We also did a lot of research on the problem and physical principles to help us in the brainstorming and protoyping process. This week we did brainstorming! I think it’s my most favorite part (aside from prototyping) because you have the liberty to be as creative and out-of-the box as you like! Also, it’s really fun to see all of the sticky notes of ideas our team came up with scattered across the walls of the OEDK conference room. Our colleague Precious, who’s currently in Nigeria, shared her ideas through pictures, and it was fun to recreate them so they could have a place on the sticky note wall.
Overall, we had around 70-ish ideas and Mina set up our Pugh screening and scoring matrices so that they would be ready for Monday. Mina, Diya, and I also came up with proxies for each of our design criteria (it was really hard), so that we could go directly from screening to scoring next week.
Rice Brooders 2.0
Okay, this name isn’t nearly as creative as my other team name, but it’s okay! It has its own charm 🙂 Our team is made up of myself, Megan, and Ben.
This week was mainly focused on integrating all of the sensing and user input aspects of the design. We were kind of at a hold in the beginning of the week because we had to wait for our relays and sensor to arrive in the mail, but once that was here, it was smooth sailing! I connected the fans in our brooder to a step down converter (since our battery supplies 12V while the fans take only 9) and then connected the fans and the heating plates to their own relays. Megan worked on the LCD and button pad, and Ben worked on the heating mount, humidifier waterproofing, and testing plan. It was going well and we had everything integrated, but then our sensor decided to stop working out of nowhere! After a lot of troubleshooting, I then decided that we should just order a new one, and that will be here hopefully at the beginning of next week so that we can get to work!
Self Development
I think my biggest setback going into the SEED program is my fear of failure. As an engineer, it’s so important to be okay with failure because its a critical aspect of prototyping and learning from your mistakes. Especially with electronics, I’ve noticed I tend to research down a rabbit hole when it could be so much more efficient and helpful for me to learn by doing. Dr. Holmes helped me understand this, and he told me to share my failures with him moving forward so I can feel more comfortable with them, and it’s working! One example is I used wires that were too thin to connect the battery to the heating plate which caused the wire to start smoking because of the amount of current that it was drawing. It became crispy, but it was a great learning experience!
It was also really great meeting all the guests at the networking lunch this week. Yvette Mirabal and Maddy Weld introduced me to the Rice360 Global Medical Innovation program, which is a master’s degree in BioE that’s open to all engineering undergrads. I think I really like the program since I want to go in the medical device field, so I’m going to look more into it.
Overall, this week was really fun! Two of our international colleagues, Chifuniro and Abubakr, arrived this week, so we had a lot of fun hanging out with them and showing them around. It was also really productive for both projects. Looking forward, I think I’ll adopt Mina’s diary-entry style blog formatting because I’ll add to it daily (it’s a really good idea, sorry Mina!). See you in my next post!
Thanks for reading, and stay sparkling,
⋆･ﾟ✧: * Parnika * : ✧･ﾟ⋆