Before the Meeting
During the Progress Meeting #1 on 9 July, where we presented our project to Dr Ho, Hanyang, and our peers, a few points were brought up. In no particular order, they are:
- Our current design is very specific to the fan
- It will be better to make a more general design that can fit to all/most fans
- We can try to make a modular design
- Since our body has already been printed, we can try to make a modular design to simply add the housing for the linear actuators to the body, so that we do not need to re-print the body
- We can make a design that allows for manual control
- Our current design with one bar for each of the buttons will wrest manual control away from the user
- We can try to reduce the number of linear actuators used
- Right now, our design requires 2 linear actuators per button. This means that the number of actuators required for the fan will increase linearly with respect to the number of buttons on the fan, which is not ideal
- We can make the design more aesthetically pleasing
- Ideas include making the design look like a ladybug on the fan
After a brief discussion over text in our group chat, we decided to have an online meeting on 10 July, 3pm, to brainstorm about designs and how we can further improve our project.
During the Meeting
A complete overhaul of the design is a bit overkill. We will tackle the problems one by one, and the first problem we’ll focus on is point 3, a design that allows for manual control.
To address point 3:
- We can make a manual override button to activate the solenoids to press the button
- Make the bars removable/slide out sideways such that the solenoid actuators are attached to the frame
- Make one moving bar to push down the buttons (this also solves point 4 but adds additional components), and the default resting position will be below/above all the buttons to enable access to the buttons
After the Meeting
Moving on from here, we will initiate a meeting with Hanyang online around 4.30pm to discuss the 3 ideas.
Zann will send Hanyang an email, and over the next 2 days, we will sketch out the ideas to prepare for the meeting on Monday.