This past week in class, we actually all physically had working prototypes that we got to share with one another! We all had the chance to work ‘design audits’ with each other – working through and explaining the designs we had with our peers, so that they understood it properly.
I had the privilege of being able to ‘audit’ two of my peers’ designs for their final projects. The first group was the vertical smart garden team. They showed me how they had wired their arduinos to both their soil humidity sensor and their LDS sensor (which detects the presence of light). It was amazing to see how much they had progressed over the course of our short semester! One critique I suggested was to incorporate two separate LEDs for each sensor output, because the one they had was flickering – perhaps because it was too large of a power load.
Secondly, I got to audit the team that created the custom overhead headphone attachments. I loved the simplicity and imitability of this design – I suggested to this group that they actually make a bunch of their product – many colors and sizes – and hand them out during the presentations. Their print time is actually only about 30 minutes so it would work out fairly well.
As for my group, we went forward with presenting our prototype to date, which included the steering wheel bracket, bushing, and custom screw used to add the physical attachments. We feel like we are right on the edge of where we want to be with our project. We are looking forward to printing our actual final parts and continue the final testing phase of the project. We can’t wait to share our idea with the world!
Nice post and reflection Ajie! I agree with you that auditing other teams and receiving feedback from other teams was something that was extremely helpful. It was neat to learn about everyone else’s ideas and to get a different perspective on our final project idea. It’s cool to see how different teams have drawn from different resources and softwares we learned this semester to help them design and prototype their final projects.
Ajie, great recap of the week – I’m glad to know that everything went well in my absence this week as it looks like you and Jason picked up my slack. I’m getting excited for us to finish up our prototype testing and get ready for our final presentation!
Hi Ajie! I was not only surprised by the work that the vertical garden group had done so far this semester, but I was surprised by everyone’s progress! All of our projects seem to be coming along so well, and I think the final presentations are going to be very interesting. Everyone has put in so much thoughtfulness and work into our projects!