hie everyone,

This week has been really great. I posted some pictures of an anteater last week and talked about how we were currently going through the engineering design process.So happy to say we have completed learning and applying the engineering design process through working on the anteater enrichment device.It was quiet OK working in my team, i learnt a lot from them and possibly they learnt from me too.Most importantly we came up with both the low fidelity and medium fidelity prototype. After brainstorming, going through the Pugh screening and scoring matrices we reached to an idea which we ended up  prototyping and testing somehow. As for our team we thought of coming up with a container which may be made up of metal and fixed to the ground. Which is to have a maze so that the anteaters can play around with their fascinating tongues.In order to have them show off their claws we included canvas straps .And also we included a PVC tube that can go through the gate for easy refilling of food in the maze.Below are the pictures of the prototypes, on the right is the low fidelity prototype and on the left is the medium fidelity prototype;

 

Each group presented their prototypes,it was fascinating seeing the diverse creative ideas.Later own learnt the basics of computer aided design and also 3D printing which can be used in our major and minor projects.

above are  some of the CAD i came up with.We were also assigned in different teams working on four major projects.My team is called team Toco. We are to come up with a device that monitors uterine contractions all in order to prevent uterine rapture which kills most women in Malawi during child birth. so on Thursday and today Friday we have  apparently started working on our project. So far we have come up with the research topics which we are working on. Earlier today we had an interview with our client Dr Carns who presented to us the proof of concept.Just a brief explanation the prototype consists of two separate fiber plastic cables which aligned are passing through the hypo tube, and one plastic fiber is connected to an elastic material.So during contractions the elastic material stretches it pulls away one optical fiber which reduces the light intensity of the light passing through them. The light is actually being emanated from an LED which is getting voltage supply from a 9v DC battery.In measuring the varying light intensity we can get the frequency output.

 

 

as a group we are to improve the low fidelity prototype,by replacing the belt with athletic tape, also including an alarm system, timer and display etc .At the same time it should be able to display accurate frequency or pressure of the abdominal contractions. It is going to be fun working on this project, i like that its so involving and electronics related .By the end of the project i will gain a lot.all happy#all smiles#slaying!!!