Week five: July 7, 2016
Lucas Gutembergue da Costa
This week was focused on the Optoco project, on Tuesday the nylon tubing we ordered arrived so we could finish the rubber accordion prototype, the picture is below:
Figure 1 -Medium fidelity prototype with the rubber accordion
The reason we decided to switch to the nylon tubing is to make the device more flexible, since the hypotube we were using was to rigid to our application. So we also modified the sewing elastic prototype and substituted the hypotube for the nylon tube.
Figure 2 – Medium fidelity prototype with the sewing elastic
Then we tested the devices on human skin by taping it, both of them worked but we couldn’t define clearly which one was the best because there were to many variables involved to make an informed decision. So we decided to do the testing in a more controlled and repeatable way.
On Wednesday we had a meeting with our client, showed her our prototypes, got feedback on our progress and she gave us a thinner and more flexible fiber optic cable. We also planned the next steps for the project and created a test plan for our device. Our goal is to be able to understand the effect of a lot of variables including: the length and the diameter of the fiber optic cable and the variability of the signal. We also want to find out what is the best within some options we have: tape vs belt to hold the device and sewing elastic vs rubber accordion.
On Thursday and Friday we brainstormed options to the fixing belt, selected the best option and made the prototype. In additon since we’ll test a big number of variables we don’t want to make a whole new prototype for each option, so we made a prototype for the electronic encasing and fiber optic support in a way the electronics and the fiber optic can be replaced. The first prototype did not work as expected, so we modified it and will continue prototyping next week.
Besides working on the Optoco project we have also stained the tree house that was built on Rice campus, next to the Ryon Lab.
Figure 2 – Staining the tree house
We also had a needs finding workshop with Dr. Ghosn. In this workshop we learned how engineers can identify problems and understand problems to produce high impact solutions. As an activity for this workshop we had to experiment how it is difficult to do simple activity with disabilities such as having arthrogryposis, being blind or using a wheel chair.
Figure 4 – Needs finding workshop activity