Materials from McMaster came in, and it appears as though we’ve ordered all the right parts! This should be a given, but that’s not the case with every project. Assembly is a little tricky, but the folks in the fab lab have been beyond helpful. We have decided to bring in the depth and width of the environment by 6″ (from 2.5′ to 2′) to better fit the school desks that Kids-U now wants to house these on. We have assembled two frames, which still need some added corner-protection for safety. Great progress so far, staying on track with the aggressive schedule.

The CAD model has been through many iterations, which worked on packaging, structural integrity, and ease-of-assembly. You can see the framing rails made of 1″ T-Slot extrusion, and the interior panels made of corrugated plastic board. It includes vacuum cups for increased stability. This model was taken to site visit #3, shown to the project partner, and approved. Since then, we have ordered materials and are preparing for fabrication!

Today we made a site visit to one of the KidsU locations near campus. This was Rachel and Rishi’s first site visit, and the third overall. The posters and decorations gave the team members some elementary school nostalgia, and we thought more about safety of the design with respect to sharp corners. We showed the project partner our current CAD (renders to come soon), and explained the goals we had in mind when designing this model. They were very excited to hear about the compact size, reduced weight, and modularity. They are already planning on bringing in designated desks at each of their locations to house our booths – we were surprised to learn that they wanted multiple!

Right now its full steam ahead into ordering parts and building the first scale model.

At the beginning of the semester, we were tossing around the idea of using a polycarb framing with the acoustic foam filling the interior. Instead of the legs, we were looking at clamping the model to the table, since that eliminates the need for telescoping (table-height-agnostic) legs. We wanted the model to fold together and be compact for easier travel, so we were playing with the geometry of the panels and hinges to reduce the space in its folded up form. A render of this initial version is included below.

Our project is continuing for the third semester under the continued guidance of Connor Kirkpatrick and a new technical mentor, Ross Martin! You can meet the 3 freshmen under the Meet the Team page. We hit the ground running with some new design ideas and started prototyping in CAD. The legs have been removed in favor of vacuum cups, to fit more tables. We have an upcoming site visit this week! Check back to see how it went next week.