Progress Report, Week 1: February 7th

Early on this semester, misunderstanding and lack of communication have thwarted our intensions to be productive from the start. Despite our compilation in mid-December of materials and company information required to build our prototype, they were never ordered. These first two weeks have been an attempt to circumnavigate our mishaps to avoid future chaos in a heavily loaded timeline.

As a lack of parts is our biggest obstacle, our first action was to contact Nubia immediately. As of the end of this week, all parts have been ordered and the majority of them have the status of “shipped”. In order to compensate and better utilize timeline issues caused by our delayed orders, we have spent our time approaching our design with a more mathematical mindset, a suggestion presented to us during the first lecture by Professor Strey. We have found kinematic equations that utilize material properties to determine the deflection of a thin plate with clamped edges and an applied, uniform load. This has helped our group to quantify, and eventually optimize, the height of the particles by implementing different diaphragm materials. An obstacle encountered with this equation involves the difficulty obtaining the poisson ratio to determine the shear modulus. We have made steps to contact the mechanical engineering department to gain access to their equipment and obtain this value.

This week the group additionally gained access to an e-portfolio in digication, which will be our main method of documenting our progress throughout the semester. All of our group members have accessed and become familiar with the pre-created tabs. Furthermore, some of the css has been modified to make the portfolio more personable. Next week, we will be adding progress reports and other supporting documents from the previous semester to make it more complete. 

We have been utilizing our Arduino force sensor to better quantify the force exerted by the brachial artery at the inner-elbow joint. Last semester, we obtained a value of 1.83N. This, however, was only n=1 and further evaluation of our figures reveals discrepancies with the time scale. We had intended to use our Friday class time to obtain new data, but were hindered by initial Arduino driver issues (as the computers in CMM have been updated to windows 7). We would like to ask Professor Liu for access to the CMM lab following class on Monday to obtain a new data set.

Moreover, we have set up a timeline to streamline our productivity, which has become very important to us due to our misplaced and compressed prototype development period. According to this plan, the group will use the upcoming week to further develop the e-portfolio, and to solidify designs and renderings in anticipation for the prototype. We also intend to begin the business plan pending more information provided to us in lecture. Our hope is to provide a framework that does not leave us crippled during our scheduled meeting with the professor (next week) or in our progress to finish this project.

Jibril Ashiru-Balogun & Ada Tsoi