February Update - Technical Reviews and Practice Presentations

The O’Bryant Inventeam worked on finalizing our design and schedule after some useful input from our first presentation to a Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams representative and a technical review with MIT Edgerton Center instructors Ed Moriarty and Alban Cobi. Using suggestions from these reviews, we did more research around existing solar panel cleaning systems and finalized a design that utilizes a wiper system with pulleys.  We came up with a CAD drawing which included the frame, the solar panel, the pulleys and motors at the four corners of the frame (two for top cable and two for bottom cable), and the rubber blade wiper device. We received great feedback about our presentation as well. We since have streamlined our presentation and highlighted the innovations of our project.

The programming and electrical teams are trying to get sensors to work with arduino and the mechanical team has been working on the pulley system, as well as testing the solar panel efficiency when it has snow on it.

Snow storms have drastically changed our build schedule; we missed several team meetings due to cancelled school days.

Also, after weeks of waiting, the solar panels finally arrived!