Before I began ME250, I was warned by numerous people that the class has potential to take over your life; they couldn’t have been more right. From the first lecture that outlined what we would be doing and learning, I knew that this class would take more work and dedication than my other classes. Despite the extra work and added stress, this class was very valuable to me and taught me many things that I will continue to apply in my engineering curriculum. I learned many things on teamwork, design, manufacturing, and how achieve a goal within a time budget.
On teamwork, I learned that dividing and conquering is the best way to go about a task when resources and time are scarce. Often I would come to lab with my team and each of us would be assigned our own task. At the end of lab we would come together again and re-evaluate what needs to be done before the next milestone. If necessary we would schedule a time to meet in order to make the requirements for the next due date, with each of us contributing something. As a team, I think we worked well together. Each of us had our strengths, so we assigned each task accordingly. We did have to work around a split team however, Cole was in the lab section before the rest of the team, so it took some extra communication to have a productive lab. Despite not being able to work entirely as a team twice a week, having a team in two sections was very beneficial from a manufacturing standpoint. We only scheduled machining time outside of lab twice for the entire project. We were very thankful for this due to our busy schedules. Overall, as a team we worked very well together with everyone contributing what they could and making sacrifices accordingly.
From a design standpoint, my knowledge in design in general increased greatly. I thought that the FRDPRC tables as well as the comparison charts were very beneficial. They are a logical way to make a decision. I have even started incorporating them into other aspects in my life (design decisions for BAJA SAE as well as major life decisions that need a logical foundation). The way designing something was broken down in lecture was also very helpful; it made this huge, mind boggling problem shrink down into something more comprehensible. It also allowed me not to get overwhelmed by the project and to take it one step at a time. I also enjoyed learning a different CAD program. I am on the BAJA SAE Team where we use CATIA. It was helpful to see the benefits and differences of each program. I think that Solidworks is a very good program to learn on and I thought that the tutorials were very helpful. As for the design of our robot, it was very interesting to me to make a decision as to what we want our “bot” to accomplish and then see it in CAD, step by step. The entire design process of our “bot” also helped me decided what I want to do with my life, whether it be manufacturing or design/product development. Seeing our robot go from rough ideas to a working CAD model made the decision clear for me that I should be tailoring m education towards design.
In the manufacturing of our “bot”, I became more familiar with the machines. Through BAJA, I have already had experience on the mill and drill press, but through this project I became more comfortable using these machines and familiar with the lathe. I also learned how to use the water jet and laser cutter. It was good experience to have machine parts and then have them line up accordingly in order to assemble our robot. We ran into a little snag when the water jet shifted our base plate by about an eighth inch. We had to re-drill some holes and fix a few parts in order to get everything to assemble correctly. However, once we did, it was very exciting to see a working robot that we designed and built.
Overall, this course was a very good experience. As stressful as it was, it was good to have the experience of a big project in a short time budget. For future classes, a more involved machine shop training would be very helpful as well as more available machines. I spend a lot of my time in the Wilson Center for BAJA and I saw many teams using the tables there because of the chaos in the ME shop. And even with my previous machining experience, I thought that the training just touched upon what we needed to do. Another helper in the shop would also be incredibly helpful, especially considering the number of people who have never been in a shop before. It was truly wonderful to see our robot go from the drawing board to coming in 4th at the competition. Thank you so much for making that possible!
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