New Design and Contacts

This month McMinnville High School’s MIT-Lemelson InvenTeam has been busy constructing new prototypes and making new contacts. We met with MIT mentor Don Domes as well as Meggitt and Oregon State University mentors. We also met with an expert who works with International Organization for Migration (IOM) and plan to meet with McMinnville Cooperative Ministries.

Our team will be featured on the local community TV program titled, Speaking Frankly: And How We Doin', on Thursday, May 28th at 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

In addition to our outreach in the community, we also modified our design to account for Mexico testing to be more comfortable. These changes include using angled support pieces instead of straight rigid surfaces to sleep on. The changes are shown in the two prototype figures below.

*Our original design

*Our new design

We constructed our latest prototype that is supported by the bottom metal hexagon that has six bamboo poles to lift up the main structure.

We have adapted our design to incorporate a middle center piece that holds up the top base structure. We added a pole attachment to the metal connecting points to hold up the bamboo or wood poles.

The PVC pipe represents bamboo or wooden poles used to hold up tarp material. Students continue to refine the final tent structure design. 

We modified the extensioning component to be tightened with a piece of bamboo that twists around the rope to tighten it instead of our previous method of ratcheting ropes tighter. The bamboo “tighteners” will then be secured to the rope with usage of a metal ring.

*View looking from the bottom up toward the rope connections from the inside.

Based on the advice given from our mentors, we decided to make aluminum cast models of our feet design instead of using steel. This is due to easier moldability and formation for more unique designs that can be manufactured more quickly. Below are our CAD model drawings of our attachment components.

Our next steps are to create the welded components and build our next full prototype as well as our small scale prototype for EurekaFest!

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Email us at: mhslemelsonmit@gmail.com