The Product of Greatness

The Product of Greatness

Through all of the setbacks faced by the group emerges a final prototype. In 10 weeks, we went from research to design to completion. It was a tough challenge with many problems occurring along the way. We successfully overcame these challenges and are set to have a working prototype by the end of this week. The freshly ordered parts have arrived and the project should finally work as planned.

There were two crucial parts that needed to be changed. Those two parts are a Step-Down and a USB Type-A socket. The Step-Up that was recently being used to increase voltage decreased the current by a large amount which rendered the solar panels useless. This was unacceptable because the cellphone was actually discharging in experimental tests. Additionally, the USB socket had to be purchased since the new Step-Down did not have one built in whereas the old one did. To ensure the Step-Down works properly, 5 solar panels will be used. This was previously 3 but has now been upped to 5 in order to guarantee a more stable current.

All in all, the project as a whole went well except for the various setbacks that were out of our control. One of the biggest hindrances to the project was the failure of the 3-D printers. We tried to do rapid-prototyping but were never able to do so since every time we tried to print the phone case, the 3-D printers would fail. We tried on 5 different occasions to make them work and they never did. This one resource that we were told would work never did and this project could have used 3-D printing to speed it up but it never worked. We tried 3-D printing in Week 5 and it didn't work, we tried each consecutive week and it still didn't work. In the end, we decided we would do a one off print from the professional grade 3-D printers. This was the biggest gripe with the entire project. Below is the design that we will be printing for the project, where the back will be covered once all of the wiring is completed.

Overall at least we will have this one completed model to show just how well our system works.