18. Project Development
This week we have to work on our final project. The detailed documentation of the final project can be viewed here:
Project status
what tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain?
So as of now(this is just a couple of days before Niel's review for the final project slide and presentation), the iteration phase 3 is going on.In terms of hardware, the design is almost ready for a TRL 3 prototype. The flasks work well as glass containers for the sand, the sand substitute right now is Semolina (coarsely grounded wheat) and works well. The mount/holder, the bottle neck (flask blocker), and the acrylic disk design is also finalised now and needs no further iterations.
In terms of electronics, there is one iteration needed as of now. The breadboard works fine, the PCB design version 1 failed due to mistakes during the PCB milling. After learning few things, the next PCB was fabricated better, but I couldn't get the right latching/toggling switch that i used from the JLCPCB library during the PCB design. So post that I have just started working on a new PCB design with the available switches and should be able to soon test and replace it.
In terms of software, I have tested the code on breadboard, it works absolutely fine. It can possibly be tuned better but the one right now is also sufficiently fine so I have decided to not touch it as of now.
what's working? what's not?
The electronics needs a bit of redesign of PCB as mentioned above. Rest all is successfully working as of now.what questions need to be resolved?
The main question to be solved after TRL 3 is the outer body design of the hourglass. So the body is visualised as a part of the current iteration, but it looks very bulky and is also not so ergonomically designed as of now. For example, the user needs to hold it to flip it upside down and that point of contact is intuitively the central bottleneck. Now that part has a bit of electronics and other mounting components which makes it hard to hold. That can easily be redesigned in my opinion, but just needs some time to redesign and reiterate. Future advancements maybe!what will happen when?
This is a more apt question to answer if asked weeks ago. Now it is almost at the end of the working phase and it is more or less about documenting this now. Regardless, assuming it would be more fruitful to showcase the project plan here, I have shared the same. In that regards, based on my plans, office work, I made a simple waterfall planning for the final project.The plan is as follows:
Week 1-4 : Finalising the idea to work upon
Week 5-6 : Plan the deliverables, final outcome, start brainstorming and ideating
Week 7-8 : Quick Prototypes and basic validation of the concepts
Week 9-12 : Hands on work with electronics
Week 13-16: Final build, feedback, interations and repeat
Week 17-18: Final prep
A detailed waterfall plan is as shown in the figure below:
what have you learned?
Ohh I have learned so much! This course overall has been a great upskilling for me. The final project was very important to have to work upon in my opinion as it gave a platform to practically try out things I learnt during the every weeks assignment.New things I learnt:
Previously touched things I revised/ learnt in detail: