Engineering Design Process: series of steps that engineers follow to come up with a solution to a problem. Many times the solution involves designing a product (like a machine or computer code) that meets certain criteria and/or accomplishes a certain task.
Engineering Design Process Overview:
This year we decided to heavily focus on the engineering design process. We have gone through many designs and prototypes of our solution and have used the engineering design process in each design/prototype. First we would sketch up the design and see what the actual design would look like, then we would start to build and prototype our design to see if it would even work. After building our prototype we would point out the pros and cons of the prototype. After looking for the pros and cons of the prototype we move on and sketch up a new design with the pros and mind and try to create a better prototype then before, and this process keeps on continuing until we have a prototype that fits our needs and solves the problem at hand.
This year we decided to heavily focus on the engineering design process. We have gone through many designs and prototypes of our solution and have used the engineering design process in each design/prototype. First we would sketch up the design and see what the actual design would look like, then we would start to build and prototype our design to see if it would even work. After building our prototype we would point out the pros and cons of the prototype. After looking for the pros and cons of the prototype we move on and sketch up a new design with the pros and mind and try to create a better prototype then before, and this process keeps on continuing until we have a prototype that fits our needs and solves the problem at hand.
Prototype 1.0
As you can see this was one of the first designs we made and it was just a concept design because we just wanted to see if the x-scissor mechanism would work at all. We ended up figuring out how we would implement it into the glove so we moved on with this type of mechanism in mind.
Pros:
Pros:
- Light weight
- Sturdy
- Too big
- Not to Scale
Prototype 1.1
Once we got our concept down we started to experiment with different materials we would use. One of these materials happened to be straws. We put together the same x-scissor mechanism and made the joints with pins. This time we wanted to account for the proximal interphalangeal joint so we put a beam that bends in half in the middle of the two x-scissor mechanisms.
Pros:
Pros:
- Very light weight
- Inexpensive
- Not very strong
- Too big
- Dangerous (Wall pins as points)
Prototype 1.3
In this prototype we tried our cardboard as it was very cheep and accessible. This was one of the first prototypes that could be worn on the hand using rings made of para cord. This proved to be unsuccessful as the rings didn't provide enough stability when moving the finger. This prototype also had three inch long nails to act as pivot points which were very dangerous for obvious reasons, and the x-scissor mechanisms didn't work at all.
Pros:
Pros:
- Light weight
- Wearable
- Dangerous (three inch long nails that protruded from the back side)
- Flimsy
- Unstable
- X-scissor mechanism didn't work
Prototype 1.2
In this version of our prototype we wanted to find a material that was cheep and sturdy so we turned to Popsicle sticks. We glued the sticks together as we did not have any pins that would act like joints so we dropped this design very fast because we couldn't be persist enough to make/cut the Popsicle sticks to the size we wanted it.
Pros:
Pros:
- Was very sturdy
- Accessible
- Wasn't able to articulate
- Too big to fit into the glove
Prototype 1.4
After doing research we looked into designs/objects that use the same mechanism (x-scissor) that our glove you uses and ran into the hoberman sphere. We did this because our homemade x-scissor mechanisms were not working too well. the hoberman ball works by using x-scissor mechanisms to expand. After buying a hoberman ball we took it apart (but not after playing with it) and used it's x-scissor mechanisms to our advantage. When we were cutting off parts of the ball we wanted to account for the proximal interphalangeal joint so we cut 3 x's and made the middle x a "joint" piece.
Pros:
Pros:
- Very light weight
- Small enough to fit into the glove/ space we need it to
- Flimsy
Prototype 1.5
Once we decided that the two x-scissor mechanisms weren't going to work we decided to put one of them that extended across the whole finger. After seeing that we could use parts of the hoberman ball we started experimenting with the x-scissor mechanisms on the hand as you can see. We taped one end of the mechanism to the end of the finger and made it so that it could pivot back and forth and we taped the other end to the knuckle. The end that was attached to the knuckle was attached to a spring as there needed to be a device that could pull the mechanism back down when we bend it up, the back end with the spring had a "runway" that it would slide up and down in and that's where the spring would be housed.
Pros:
Pros:
- X-scissor mechanisms folded upwards when we bent our fingers
- was light weight
- Was flimsy and would normally bend when we closed out hands
- Duck tape was directly attached to our fingers and hands (caused irritation and was inconvenient)
- Wasn't very cost efficient (wasted a lot of duck tape)
Prototype 1.6
After we burned through some more concepts and did more brainstorming we realized that instead of a spring controlling the pull back/retraction of the x-scissor mechanism we could use a tape measure to retract the mechanism.
Pros:
Pros:
- Was successful at pulling back the x-scissor mechanism
- Was very reliable as it would pull it consistently
- Bulky
- Heavy
Prototype 1.7
Once we had decided that the x-scissor mechanisms would work we decided to add more x-scissor mechanisms to more of the fingers while using the same method to attach them. We did this by attaching one end of the x-scissor mechanism to our finger tips and this time around we decided to attach the other end of the x-scissor mechanism to stings that were tied to the tape measure. While we were testing the sting they would go everywhere and it would become very tangled so as a a temporary solution we taped them together to prevent tangling.
Pros:
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This is our prototype inside of a pressurized glove to simulate what it would be like inside of the bladder and to test if it would actually solve the problem and it did.
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Prototype 1.8
In this prototype we wanted to find out a way to solve some of the problems that we were having with our previous prototype. Some of those problems were the tape irritating the skin when we put it directly on the hand and the stings getting caught/tangled. To solve the irritation we put the tape on a glove so that the tape doesn't directly have to touch the skin and so we won't have to waste as much tape if we want to put it back on. To solve our second problem of the stings getting tangled we had a sorting system made of straws that had one central tube that branched off into three other ways to match the 3 different x-scissor mechanisms, this also helped with the overall stability and look of the prototype.
Pros:
Pros:
- Little to no tape wasted on reapplying the glove
- Looks a lot better
- More sturdy
- More organized string sorting system
- Lightweight
- Tape measure is very bulky and heavy
- Tight glove causes user to sweat
Prototype 1.9
In this prototype we got tired of the bulky and heavy tape measure so we decided to take a fairly small and lightweight tape measure and take it apart. Before we took apart the tape measure you see above we took apart two other tape measures apart to check how the tape measures mechanism works to ensure that we wouldn't break the one we were going to use (one above). Inside of a tape measure is a coiled piece of this metal that acts almost like a spring so that the measuring tape can retract. We ended up breaking those ones... so after experimenting with those we decided to take the leap and take apart the tape measure. Our plan was to replace the measurement tape with string so that it can be smaller and so that we can have more articulation because with the old measuring tape we had imitated articulation and couldn't bend our arms in certain ways.
Pros:
Pros:
- Allowed for more articulation
- Much more light
- Much less bulky
- Can sometimes get tangled (if it does we would have to take the whole thing apart)
Prototype 2.0
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This was our final sketch of our prototype.
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As you can see there this is our final prototype. This combines all of the good concepts that we have been developing like the string rewiring system (straw guides), the string tape measure, and the three x-scissor mechanisms on the fingers. We decided to put on a less skin tight glove as it would not cause as much sweating as the other glove and we used Velcro to hold the tape measure in place. The Velcro did not effect any aspects of our articulation so we still had full arm movements. Our plan for this prototype was to make it look more appealing and make it function better. Some of the things we improved was simplifying the sting sorter and directly attaching it to the glove. This improved our over all design because in version 1.8 the string sorter was a whole different module and would move around quite often to we solved it by putting the straws right on the glove.
Pros:
Pros:
- Even more visually appealing then any other model
- String sorter doesn't move around
- The retracting device is attached on to the arm so that we don't have to hold it
- Over all functions better (x-scissor mechanism alignment is better and more exact)
- Doesn't make the user sweat as much
- Can still sweat in the glove but not as easy and fast as other designs
- Doesn't have x-scissor mechanisms on all 5 of the fingers
Prototype 2.1
In this prototype we were looking to make the retracting device more compact because if our solution would go up to space there would not be a tape measure because it is not very convent. To fix this we came up with a retracting device that works like a diving board. When we bend our fingers the diving board would bend down and the x-scissor mechanism will fold up. Once the wearer puts his/her fingers back into the resting position the diving board will bend up and retract the x-scissor mechanism. The diving board was made of the measuring tape that we took out from prototype version 1.9, we had to tape multiple layers because it would be too flimsy if there was just one layer. This design unfortunately did not work so we just used prototype 2.0.
Pros:
Pros:
- More compact
- Lighter over all weight
- Sleeker design
- The x-scissor mechanism wouldn't go back up
- Diving board gave too much resistance when trying to bend our fingers
- Diving board didn't work at all