Lessons Learned
- A good set of requirements and priorities can almost design the product for you
- Reflection helps us stay grounded in our process
- Proper preparation diminishes doubts
- Sometimes good enough and working is better than perfect and not working
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My engineering capstone was a portable thermoelectric generator capable of charging a phone using a bag of ice water and a tea candle flame.
The driving mechanic for our generator is the Piezoelectric Effect which is influenced by a temperature difference.
The first semester consisted of deciding on a project and researching it with the goal of presenting a project proposal to gain funding.
Deciding on an idea was a challenge as we had all gone into it with a variety of ideas, but when we found common ground
on wanting to make something that we all would use we decided on the topic of camping. This led to a discussion about the inconvienence of
hauling generators and the less than ideal pollution caused by them. Thus, the idea of a green generator was born. After further research and
discussions about the types of green energy: throwing out solar as it can only work during the day and fails under a canopy of trees, saying no
to hydro because it relies heavily on a source of running water, and finally settling on thermo because of the numerous sources of temperature
in the wilderness when camping.
This was also the when we began filling out design and plan documents such as a house of quality (HOQ), bill of materials (BOM), and Gantt charts.
I found it fascinating how much a good set of requirements (or shalls) and priorities can almost design the product for you.
Another document/practice that we used throughout the year were writing weekly memos discussing our progress, obstacles, thoughts, and plans moving forward.
This helped us stay on track and address smaller issues that may not have been brought up otherwise. We found that
reflection helped us stay grounded in our process and it helped give us a backlog to work on individually. We found
Gantt charts very helpful when assigning tasks and allowed everyone to stay aware of what the others were working on.
An early version of our Gantt chart
The first version of our House of Quality
At the end of the first semester we put together a final project proposal that we presented to investors (our classmates and professors). This presentation held the future for our capstone (essentially deciding if we would be taking this course again next year) and though I felt nervous going into it because we had spent the 4 prior months researching and discussing the purpose of our project as soon as we began presenting I was a lot more confident and I could feel the same from my team. Our preparation took care of our doubts.
The second semester was mostly prototyping and building a working version of the generator for Legacy Symposium (an annual event at Loras where students present projects and research). My biggest takeaway from this is that sometimes good enough and working is better than perfect and not working. We found ourselves pressed with time as Legacy approached and some of the extra functionality and polish we had planned had to be scrapped. It was disappointing, but we had heard cautionary tales of teams trying to do it all and not having anything to present.
Our team with our presentation at Legacy Symposium
A successful demonstration at Legacy
One of the first times we got a charge!