Hello again,

It’s been quite a busy week here on Team Petri-FI. Our second week was spent mostly familiarizing ourselves with two previous prototypes. One device is from a previous freshman design team. It consists of a massive thermos with all the electronics stored inside. The other prototype, nicknamed the Minicubator, uses a 3D printed box. Unfortunately, we had to rip apart the model in order to examine the electronics.

Even more unfortunately, when we tried testing the Minicubator’s electronics, we shorted out the PCB. A PCB is a very small, condensed circuit board, about the size and shape of a credit card. Since we found out that the shortest time to order a new PCB is 18 business days (they have to be made custom) and we have about that many days left in our internship, we took drastic measures and recreated the PCB with a breadboard:

One of my teammates put in all those wires by hand – go Nancy! Now to debug it . . .

After we observed these prototypes, we set our sights on our own design. As a team, we’ve spent a few hours brainstorming ideas for all the different components, such as heating mechanism, type of heating chamber, and how the user will be able to interact with collected data. One of the rules of brainstorming (yes, there are rules) is that wild ideas are encouraged. Here’s a particularly wild one: this awesome heated lunchbox. While the size and lack of extended battery life render this product unfit for our purposes, you have to admit it would be pretty cool to boil spaghetti inside your lunchbox while you’re in class.

The last update for this week regards the UI (user interface). We’ve already decided that our interface will be a small screen with three buttons – up, down, and OK. Now we have to determine how those buttons will be used to navigate through the program. Even though our device doesn’t really have all that many functionalities – basically just to set the temperature, set the time, start and stop the incubation period, and see data – it took quite a while and a lot of thought to plan each screen out. There were only eight screens to design, but we worked for three hours on just drawing out what we want!

Team Petri-FI’s next steps are to write a program in Python that can replicate the UI functionality for others to complete usability testing on. This will give us feedback on what works and what is confusing about our layout. We’ll also continue to work on scoring our brainstormed ideas by how well they fit each of our design criteria. Once we do that, it’s go for prototyping our very own solution.

See you soon in the next blog,

Sara