Week Five: July 7th, 2015
Mikaela Juzswik
Things are really starting to heat up this week. A few days ago, we welcomed Nehuwa to the party, which was pretty awesome–our Best Breasties grew from a team of two to a team of three, which let us expand our options and have a more versatile approach to the prototyping process. Hurray for teamwork!
This week marks the beginning of one of the more exciting parts of the design process: prototyping. We started with low-fidelity prototypes that were meant as proof of concept models, which essentially translates to “engineering arts and crafts.” Which, for me, is basically what I do when I’m not at work anyway, so it’s a ton of fun. We spent the first few days of the week focusing on the pressure mechanisms, mostly working with the idea of using a plastic bellows or a water bottle as a diaphragm to generate pressure. Prototyping a functioning bellows is largely summed up as visiting Amazon, so we crossed that bridge in a few minutes, although we haven’t been able to test things in detail until the bellows is actually delivered here. The water bottle diaphragm, naturally, was a little more involved. We experimented with types of water bottles, springs, and tubing before settling on what would potentially be a working model, although we had some reserves about the durability of the entire device.
Later in the week, we began moving away from pressure-generating systems and instead focused on ways to manage our pressure. Tubing proved to be a relatively simple problem, as tygon tubing or flexible PVC is both cheap and readily available. However, we faced difficulties when we attempted to prototype a one-wave valve to clear the air/milk flow and generate suction. Our of $10 meant that we couldn’t afford to spend more than $1 on a one-way valve, which actually proved quite problematic. Most one-way valves are fairly cheap by our standards, ranging around $1.50 – $3.00 per unit, but we couldn’t afford to dedicate so much of our budget to such a small (but vital) part. We attempted to make our own valves, using an astounding variety of materials, such as PVC, marbles, pens, and gloves, but we couldn’t create a cheap enough one that had the tolerance we needed.
For a while, we thought we were stuck. There was a difficult line between juggling comfort, cost, and plausibility in our device, and we didn’t quite seem able to balance all three.
However, on Thursday, we got some great news! Dr. Oden suggested to us that our budget may not actually be as constraining as we had originally imagined. With the end of the week approaching (we had Friday off to celebrate Independence Day), we weren’t able to fully understand the implications of such a change, but we expect a fair decrease in our budget-based concerns in the coming week. Hurray, and onward!