This week was simply dedicated to working on our prototypes for our final project. We made a lot of progress this week, and things are looking great! Some of our materials came in this week, so we got to begin testing out some of the parts that are going in our fish tank. While we ran into several problems throughout the day, we were eventually able to solve all of them and continue progress on our project.
The first problem presented itself within the opening minutes of class. Our teacher told us that our fish pump and tubes had come in, and we were very excited to try them out. Unfortunately, to our dismay, the hole for the tube to go into the fish pump was actually too large for the tube. We quickly reacted though, and got out some measurement tools and measured the size of the fish pump hole and the diameter of the tubing. We then used these measurements to create an adapter that would go into the hole but the other end would provide a snug fit for the tubing. This was the first time I realized how useful 3D printing could truly be firsthand. Before 3D printing, we would have been out of luck, and had to get new tubing, or searched for a pre-manufactured adapter. However, thanks to 3D printing we were able to get fix the problem within the hour, and continue progress on our prototype.
Once we had the tube fit snugly into the pump, we were able to test the pump out to see what setting we would need it on to get the flow of water that we wanted. After a couple tests we got it to the setting we want. A picture of our initial test is provided below.
Finally, we capped the day off with sanding down the connectors on our plant containers to see if we could get them to fit. Last week, we printed the containers out, and the holes ended up being a little too small for our connectors. However, after a couple minutes of sanding, the connectors had lost enough material to be a perfect fit, and we were able to do a test run of the pump bringing water to the top container and letting it flow down to the lower containers. It was really gratifying to see our initial design and hard work come all this way to a working prototype.
I hope to continue making progress in this next week and finish our final design in the next couple weeks. I can’t wait to see not only how our product progresses, but how the projects of the other teams progress into awesome designs!
Hello,
Glad to see that you are making progress on your project. I see that you did alot of on the spot design changes and that means you learned alot about your product and how it should work. Good to see that your immersing yourself in the project and developing your problem solving skills.
Although you had some problems last week, it seems like you recovered. My team and I ran into multiple problems. We were able to notice and decide what needed to get done to get past the problem. We even had to ompletely change our first product idea. Everything happens for a reason! I cannot wait to see your final product!