CAKEBOT: "Demo Day is Coming" II

Demo Day is Thursday, December 18 -- but our project website was due Monday, December 15. Having met several times over the last week and half, my team has been pushing to finally finish our full mechanism. Griffin and I were lucky to have the electronics systems finished, except for the limiting switches, a few days ago. I tested the motors and Arduino code to ensure that we were able to move them appropriately, and Griffin worked diligently to wrap up the GUI as I tried to offer what little python I remembered.

However, in the midst of finals week at both Olin and Wellesley, the mechanical aspects fell a little behind as my teammates were fighting for space in the woodshop and laser cutter with the many other Olin students who needed it for their own projects. With the majority of my project finished, I took charge over the website as the only individual familiar with Weebly hosting-site. Originally, Griffin setup an HTML template for us all to edit but, as it began to prove inefficient, we switched immediately to the suggested Weebly and I was probably the happiest out of all of us. As also the only person who has been photographing and reflecting throughout our process, I found it quite easy to find pictures, clips and details for the website: See at thepoecakebot.weebly.com.

At 5pm on Monday, the team submitted our beautifully designed site -- complete with our team student biographies; section-pages which detailed the design of all main components; and diagrams and target goals for the production process. We hit all the required components -- outside of a live demo video showing the final product due to it still being assembled. I was able to explain the situation to our professors about how we were lacking one, important mechanical piece and would not be able to demo it by Monday evening. Fortunately, they were very gracious about it and our team was relieved to discover we could continue to edit and upload media to our site after 5pm. Check out our beauty (thepoecakebot.weebly.com) when you get the chance!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hackathon: TechTogether Boston

Image
iOS app Last weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in Boston's largest all-female and non-binary hackathon! A group of friends and I wanted to digest as much tech and nerd information as possible, and we basically made it our mission to go to nearly every workshop session offered for two days straight. I don't know how we managed this but we did. From 5p on Friday and all day on Saturday, it seemed I bounced from one room to the next with a nap here and there. There was a workshop on rapid prototyping with AdobeXD -- which I am in love with. Then, I was able to create my first phone application during a workshop on iOS app development with Swift  (it's much easier than I had imagined), followed by a workshop at 2am on Android app developmen t. For my very first hackathon-conference, I wanted to focus on skill development and learning, rather than the competition. However, seeing everyone so wrapped up in their individual designs and programming ...
Read more

Women of Color in Graduate School

Image
Recently, I've been asked (by a few people) how it feels to go through graduate school as a woman of color. And, to be completely honest, it's incredibly exciting and exhausting all at the same time. Being a woman of color -- specifically a black woman, particularly in STEM -- has a lot of challenges. If you simply search the phrase "black in graduate school," you will get statistics that are very humbling; articles and think-pieces on how different the Black or person-of-color experience is from students who are not minorities; and other outlets detailing how little support many Black and non-Black students of color feel that they have. In fact, the Council on Graduate Schools recently reported that, in 2017, Black students made up just 11.9% of all first-time graduate students in the United States. (That said, 68% of them were women! So, we are making p r o g r e s s.) I'm not sure what the numbers are at Boston University, but it doesn't seem that far o...
Read more

Truss Design (Final)

Image
We finally made it to the end! After the preliminary design report, it was time to finalize our actual design (since we were given enough materials to make one truss to test). After doing a few more draft sketches and analysis, I was able to pick up on patterns on which types of designs produced the maximum strength (all within the parameters we were given). Finally, I came up with the sketch at the bottom-right, and the MATLAB analysis produced the highest load we were able to reach. We theorized that: two members would buckle first instead of just one (Members 3 and 4); the maximum load is 11.62 ± 0.063N; and the total cost of the truss is $290 (under the budget limit). From there, we moved to prototyping: we cut the straws as close as possible to the lengths specified in our final design. To create uniform gusset plates, our "joints," we used the circular cap of an individual Tropicana Orange Juice bottle. It met the area requirements and acted as a stamp...
Read more