9/28/16 - Paseo Prototyping Challenge

This post refers to the Paseo Public Prototyping Challenge. The purpose is as follows:

The Paseo Public Prototyping Challenge is designed to incubate solutions to pressing social and environmental problems through multidisciplinary collaboration and technological innovation.

Multidisciplinary student teams from San José State University will be selected, mentored, and provided seed funding to develop civic innovation prototypes for presentation at the Paseo Public Prototyping Festival – an arts, culture and technology festival held at the newly opened SJSU/ Hammer Theatre Center in Spring 2017.

I attended the launch on 9/21/16. Here are some dimly-lit pictures proving that I was present:

              

The launch began with several important people discussing how important it is that people collaborate to fix a problem within the community. I've listed the speakers below.

• Dr. Lisa Vollendorf, Dean of College of Humanities and the Arts
• Danny Harris, Knight Foundation Program Director
• Paul Lanning, VP of University Advancement
• Sid Espinoza, Director of Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at Microsoft

These people all had the same general message. San Jose focuses on tech and innovation, yet our community is filled with rising housing prices and homelessness. We are the next generation of change and the leader of social movements. We need to shift our political attention to sustainable cities. Goal of zero bike and pedestrian deaths. Basically, this challenge is supposed to be the appeal to young people to fix the problems that the old people created, as is the case often for engineers. Our challenge is to prototype something cool with the chance to win $10,000. They even gave out raffle prizes of Intel Arduino and Edison and a Microsoft Edge 4. Personally, I think the raffle prizes were unnecessary and the event was a bore. But the cookies afterwards weren't half bad.

9/21/16

This week we are focusing more on specifications of how we will construct our new test track. Ron guided us towards how we should be tackling our tasks for the next couple weeks and we've brainstormed what to do if a car should crash into one of the support beams. The list of possibilities can be found on the Full Scale blog: http://fullscaletesttrack-2016-2017.blogspot.com/

We've decided on a layer of aluminum surrounding a layer of protective foam surrounding the support beam. I had thought it would be a neat idea to combine the two layers by using 

Duocel® aluminum foam, which is porous aluminum. Here are the specs:

Upon further research, this would've been too costly and perhaps not strong enough to withstand the force of a car crash, which we estimated to be around 3,336,000 N of force. Thus we decided on aluminum, which is ductile yet light, on the outside. The inside would be some kind of foam so the vibrations from hitting the aluminum wouldn't shatter the beam itself. Some materials we're looking at are HR polyurethane (commonly used in mattresses) and ethafoam. For future use, we thought we might contact this company http://www.houseoffoam.net/contact.htm for assistance because they're local.

Next, I need to design a test track rough estimate of a model on SolidWorks. Since none of us know the dimensions of the bogey, it'll be interesting to see how our models turn out.

9/14/16

Updates

I'm very relieved that we've finally been given some guidance on what exactly is the goal of our project. It was strenuous to be tasked with a completely new project that none of the teammates had any knowledge on. I'm sure over time we'll become more accustomed with vibrations, but it's still very daunting right now.

I'm excited to start designing what the new guideway will look like, though I'm a bit disappointed it won't incorporate any changes in bogey design, since we have to use the current bogey in our testing. (It has a ton of wheels!) SolidWorks will be fun to use again, and I'm interested in learning more about the built-in load testing features. I'm especially interested in learning about shock absorbers and integrating them into the new suspension design. It will hopefully turn out well! I'm a little apprehensive that I've been chosen as the team leader, but hopefully my team will be there throughout the whole process to support the work we're doing together.