After having Monday off for the 4th of July, we dove in Tuesday to finish up our accordion prototype so that we could compare it with the sewing elastic version. The two prototypes are below–accordion on the left, sewing elastic on the right.
We compared the two by taping them to my stomach (one at a time) and connecting the wires to the Arduino to monitor the light level getting through the fiber optic cable. We would look at the effects of my normal breathing as well as when I puffed my stomach up as much as possible–I’ve been told it’s an impressive ability of mine. When we tried the accordion version, we found that after the first stomach puffing, the light level didn’t return to the original value but rather a bit lower. We think it was due to the fiber optic cable being rather long such that there was notable curvature and that the friction of the cable against the guiding tube stopped the pieces from returning to touching. For example, the light level started around 400, dropped to 200 when I puffed my stomach, but only went back to around 350 after relaxing again. The sewing elastic version on the other hand did not have this problem, likely because the fiber optic/guiding tube is shorter.
On Wednesday morning we went to visit out client Dr. Carns at the BRC to show her the prototypes we had made thus far. After lunch Dr. Ghosn from the Department of Bioengineering led a workshop for all of the interns on how to find the needs that lead to engineering design projects. First we talked about strategies for finding needs and various needs that we see on Rice’s campus. Then we did three activities: trying to eat cereal with our arm bandaged to hold it in an arthrogryposis-like position, walking around the OEDK blindfolded to simulate being blind, and riding a wheelchair. I learned that I do not have the upper body strength to use a wheelchair for more than about 10 minutes and I barely made it up the ramp at the OEDK. I had never thought about how hard it must be because I’ve never had an experience to force me to think about it, so I think this workshop has made me more aware of what is required to use a wheelchair.
Thursday morning the entire intern group worked on staining the treehouse behind Ryon Laboratory that I actually built as my ENGI 120/200 project all year. While I was ecstatic at the end of the school year when the treehouse was completed, it was a nice little revisit yesterday and I’m super happy with the way the stain turned out. Shoutout to my teammates from Team Treehouse for the awesome treehouse and shoutout to everyone in SEED for staining it! It’s looking good 🙂
After lunch, we brainstormed ideas for a belt to hold the boxes of the device to the belly as an alternate to tape. We then screened them and decided that a velcro option would be best, so we started building that Friday morning. I mostly worked on that since I like sewing while the rest of the team worked on making a better way to hold our LED and photoresistor in the box. Overall it was a really fun week!