Continuing off our previous week’s brainstorming session, we expanded on several designs by creating detailed sketches and notes for every idea. We also made a list of criteria to rank our concepts, and as a guideline to design around. We determined our device needed to be effective, simple, sturdy, portable (compact), light weight, and self-sufficient for a long duration. We presented our sketches and summaries to our advisor, Professor Reinkensmeyer, to understand whether we were on the right track. After determining that we were heading in the direction he wanted, Professor Reinkensmeyer suggested we go beyond the scope of having a mass actuate back and forth, and try to be more creative. As a team, we will discuss this more in the upcoming days. For the remainder of the week, we created a budget and prepared a power point presentation covering our project’s background, goals and objectives, target audience, specifications, designs, and timeline. This document was presented at our peer review, and the feedback we received was helpful. Concerns about annoyance from being probed or perturbed all day was a big issue, suggesting that we need to focus closely on how to make a very slight perturbation. Other than that main concern, the reviewers ask fundamental and general questions about our goals, and our plans to achieve those objectives. After our discussions with our advisor and peers, we will be expanding our ideas more, and eliminating any impractical ones. We plan on starting a CAD for our design that best fits our chosen criteria at the end of the week.

Kevin Kuan
Walking Perturber