Day 2: Team Selection Problem Acquisition and the First Brainstorm

Post 1 – January 10^th, 2012

It’s official! Our team has been chosen. Mason, Tom and myself will be working on the problem assigned to the Tuesday Lab Section, the Sticker Inspector Machine. If you are in the Tuesday section also, feel free to leave a comment. It will make it easy to brainstorm with others and communicate between different members who have different designations. Fellow mech’s – I’m talking to you!

After buying the textbook and attending the lecture between 5 and 6 pm yesterday, we had time to read over and understand the problem to be tackled more thoroughly. After a short meeting in the common room to register our team, we found a vacant tutorial room and got down to brainstorming. Just as we did in Praxis II, we started by brainstorming using the chalkboards.

We took a few minutes individually coming up with a few basic design concepts, and then looked at each design individually. Overall, the results were quite different from one another, so it will be interesting to incorporate the strongest parts of each design into the final design.

I’m going to look at some SolidWorks tutorials this weekend, as designing things in a digital environment can save lots of time and money in the long run, in comparison to trial and error with physical artefacts. If I find anything interesting, I will post it here and on the links page.

-       Abby