I learned a lot about myself, engineering and manufacturing in ME 250. As a member of the Solar Car Team here at Michigan I have learned a bit about the design process, but not as much about the manufacturing process. ME 250 taught me a lot about this process. This class was informative because it was a good combination of both the theoretical side of engineering and the hands-on, practical side. Before taking this class, I had experience working with wood, but I had never made a part from metal, let alone on a mill or a lathe.
Previously, the experience that I had on the Solar Car Team was on the operations division, and had never worked with CAD or experienced the design process. Taking this class helped me become a more important member of the Solar Car Team by teaching me about this process. Learning SolidWorks enabled me to put my thoughts into tangible items.
Along with this, this class enabled me to take something from thoughts and ideas to a CAD model and even further to a completed item. Seeing, and being a part of this process was thrilling. Not many more classes at the University will allow me to do something like this again.
Furthermore, I learned a lot about myself in this class. There are always ups and downs in any project like this, and it is important to keep your head up and help others on your team to do the same. A group cannot go forward without all of the members of the team. I think it was also important that one of the people in our group really stepped up and took over the team. Even though our leader wasn’t a formally elected entity, it was important to have a person to go to make sure everything was in line and to keep us in line as to what needs to get done and when.
As for the class, I believe that starting the design process sooner would be nice for the class. It seemed like we had to decide what our machine was going to be very quickly. There was not a whole lot of time available to “sleep” on ideas we had discussed. I believe more time would have been nice. In addition, I wish that I would have looked at other team’s designs in the previous years to get a better idea as to the amount of power the motors had. This was the fundamental design flaw in our robot.
One concern I had was the manufacturing of the each of the tables. I know that it was hard for some teams to execute their robots due to the minor discrepancies in each of the tables. One team in particular designed a machine based upon the CAD model and it fit in one of the tables and not the other. Based upon our robot, one of the tables had more balls in the middle of the table that were closer together. Due to the lack of power in our motors and the way we had to play the game, it would have been advantageous to play on the other table. This needs to be fixed for next year.
Finally, I disagree with the way that “ties” were handled. I believe that something better needed to be done than whoever pushed the flipper over wins the game. This was to our disadvantage, and luckily never harmed us, but I thought it was unfair to the teams that could have scored had they beaten them to the flipper compared with the teams who were fastest to the flipper but were unable to score. Some sort of play-off could solve this.
In conclusion, I had a good time in this class and had a great group to design a robot with, but fourth place? I’m disappointed that I stayed for 3 hours to beaten just before the podium. In all seriousness, this class was an overall great experience and will help me in the future.
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