Mexico Testing and New Prototypes
March and early April has been really busy testing phases for the McMinnville High School Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam. We were able to take the advice given to us at the Mid-Technical Review and apply it to our invention. After going through testing and redesigning of our invention, we have come up with new prototypes that better meet both the original and new design constraints that we created for this project.
We have also moved into a larger building space where we can fit all of our full scale prototypes!
We found a few flaws with our original design that was tested in Mexico, but since then have developed a new model of our design that are currently working on. Our mentors made a few suggestions about easy set-up. Also, we agreed to buy longer pieces of bamboo and increase the area of our next platform. We also hope to restructure our design to make it more comfortable. Our next large scale platform will be constructed next week.
Below are some pictures of some of team members setting up the model that came back from Mexico in our new working space:
We created a short video today of our latest prototype and one of our team members detailing the Mexico testing experience. We are currently finishing our blog debriefing this experience. We will include the video in the blog. Our feet modules and legs have been improved the most and are being manufactured this week. One of our team members found a load-bar with a ratcheting extender that may use for our next design.
Our Mexico prototype weighed around 200 pounds, but with wood, not bamboo. So our next prototype will hopefully be lighter, but we will weigh the next full scale model we build.
We are also building more full scale models to use in the McMinnville community and for our own stress testing as well as a few smaller scale models. We are traveling to Oregon State University next week and are meeting with someone to discuss disaster preparation and use the equipment available there. We ordered some materials today and plan to order a lot more materials next week for model construction.
In the remaining time of April, we hope to visit more mentors, find more opportunites to test our project and meet with more engineers, and build some more prototypes with slight modifications. One of our main prototypes that we are constructing next is our "Tee-pee Design" where we have bamboo poles sticking out of our shelter platform to support tarps securely.
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Email us at: mhslemelsonmit@gmail.com
