Team Progress
Weekly Updates and Relevant Documents
Weekly Updates
The Fruits of Our Labor
Week 1
April 11th to 16th, 2018
Getting to know our partner and the project.
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April 11th - Our first meeting with Dr. Nikki Saxena when we able to ask questions and brainstorm. We also each colaborated to write our team contract. We decided to use Slack as our means of communication.
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April 14th - The team met with Dr. Saxena at the PWG.
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April 15th - We shared ideas over the weekend and we will give each other updates this coming week when we meet on Wednesday. We also signed our team contract.
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Reflection:
The team has been keeping good communication, sharing ideas and keeping up with deadlines. Many design ideas were generated and our next step is to narrow down to one single design.
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Week 2
April 17th to 23rd, 2018
Week of decision and planning.
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April 17th - We had a meeting with Dr. Nikki Saxena to discuss about two designs for a stadiometer. Although Dr. Saxena expressed acceptance of both designs, the team decided to do further investigation on parts and labor of both before coming to a decision.
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April 23rd - The team has been working in the Gantt Chart and other documents for the project remotely and keeping communication through Slack.
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Reflection:
The team has come up with interesting designs and everyone seems excited about getting started on the hands on part of the project.
Week 3
April 24th to 30th, 2018
Week of experiments.
April 24th -This week we only met once and divided some of the workload. Patrick is going to work on the casing design, Randol on the code, and Rafael on the circuitry. JP and I will be filling in the gaps.
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Reflection:
This was a slow week in terms of working together. But everyone was contributing on their own time.
Week 4
May 1st to 7th, 2018
Putting pieces together.
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May 1st - We spent a few hours deciding the parts and adjusting our Gantt chart. We also discussed about the size of the casing and made a 3D model of our design with cardboard. After further ideation and a productive discussion with our professor Dr. J. Kuckzenski, an extendable device is being considered to achieve better results. Next week we should have a physical prototype to test on.
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Reflection:
It is important to prototype and have some solid object that we can work with. The cardboard suggestion was a great start.
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Week 5
May 8th to 14th, 2018
The prototyping week.
May 8th - Making a tangible product that we can have a better sense of what works and what doesn't work. During class time, the team got together to discuss what parts we needed to order and we tested the laser cut casing for size and functionality and also tried to run the existing code on the recently arrived Arduino Mega we had ordered. The code needs some adjustments and Dr. JAK and Max, our TA, offered some insights.
We didn't meet for the rest of the week because some members of our team had to present their capstone project at Senior Design Conference at SCU.
Week 6
May 15th to 21st, 2018
Improvements.
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May 15th - Today was the presentation day. We created a set of slides to give an update of our project to the class and Dr. Niki Saxena our community partner. Dr. Saxena was very excited with the beginning of our prototype and gave us great feedback. We will be working on having a prototype ready to test in the next week or so.
May 21st - We received the classroom feedback about our presentation and I agree with the comments. Improvements that we need to do relate to more attention creating the slides. Make the pictures a clearly visible to everyone, better organized and free of misspellings. In terms of presentation skills, we should balance the content each member will present and show more enthusiasm about the project.
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Week 7
May 22nd to 28th, 2018
Final Details and Assembly.
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May 22nd - The team worked together during our lecture time and made decisions about the casing design and how to allow the future user to be able to change batteries. We also consulted with Dr. JAK about the voltage needed to run the stadiometer with all the existing components. We were concerned about the new on/off button and thought we needed more than 9 volts to power the system. With Dr. JAK's help, we now know that 9 volts is sufficient. Since our time is very limited now, we also decided to go with a simple snap connector for the 9 volts instead of a special battery box. Rafael also asked questions about the code and we decided to go to the Marker Lab to solder the LED screen to a header strip to make the connections simpler and easier to test. There is still a lot to accomplish by next week and we should have a complete case ready to assemble the parts and test the device.
Week 8
May 29th to June 4th, 2018
Testing and Optimization.
May 29th - The team met at the usual class time to quickly give updates to Dr. JAK. Rafael and I went to the Maker lab to perform some testing and we realized that the measurements taken by the ping sensors were not accurate. We could not solve the problem and we believe that we need to place the circuitry in the casing for further conclusions. We think that once all parts are put together we will be able to do minor changes in the parameters of the code.
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May 31st - 3D printed of the casing started on May 31st around 7pm and it will be ready by the morning. The middle top alone was supposed to take over 9 hours to complete.
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June 1st - The 3D printer got clogged overnight and the printing job had to be restarted. Another 9 more hours was going to be required. Unfortunately when the job was 2 hours away to be completed, we realized that the scaffold was not printed and there was nothing to support the printed material of the final side being printed. The job was cancelled and restarted one more time.
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June 4th - All 3 top 3D printed parts and laser cut bottom piece should be done today to be assembled with the casing. We will run tests and adjust the code as needed.
Project Acomplishments
June 5th
We presented our final design today to our community partner during class time. The device was assembled and we were able to achieve a proof of concept. We had issues with some of the wiring connections therefore it was not possible for us to give a demonstration during our presentation. Our community partner Dr. Saxena was pleased with the results and she is looking forward to test the device in the clinic once fine tuning of the device is completed. We hope that in the Fall 2018 another group of students will take on this project and improve on our design.