Prompt#8 Hand-on Experience

Being a engineer so far, the feeling that building a actual prototype is much harder than I used to think. We always have a lot of ideas during design process, some are really creative and original. But when we need to build a prototype to show our ideas, various problems appeared.

In my EGR 100 class, my second project is to create a system that help students move-in and move-out during the beginning and end of each semester. At first, our team come up with 3 ways to fix the move-in and move-out problem. After discussion, the final design is that we will set a pair of track on the stairs and put a winch on the destination floor to pull the cart that contains the belongs of students. In the platform, we put a turntable to help cart turing.

When we build the model of this design, it just cannot works due to all kind of reasons like the wrong proportion, wrong material and so on. And we need to put a lot of effort to revise it and change it until it works. About proportion, we chose to ignore most of stairs and only do part of it, because the rest of stairs basically are the same as the stairs appeared in our prototype. The biggest challenge of our prototype I think is how to build a turntable in the platform. We use a circled wood put on the platform and use a nail to attach on the platform. At first, the circled wood is too big, sometimes it will stock by stairs. So we made a smaller one instead. And then, our circled wood is too thick to turn. So, we just made it thiner one. Anyway, after a serious work, our prototype finally worked even though it is not 100 percent show our idea. So, coming up with ideas sometimes is actually easier than to make a prototype. If people want reveal their entire ideas in prototype, then it need a huge number of works.