Month: September 2016

It’s the fifth week of CATS and there is finally some action to get excited about. The Bill of Materials was finally completed this week, and after lots of planning and lots of debating the pros and cons between different materials, the total amount summed up to $241.51.

Although this price is over our original aim, the carefully chosen material is worth the extra pennies. For example, the RFID Card Reader we chose specifically reads TigerOne cards (Clemson University’s ID cards) so users won’t have to lug around a card shaped key in their wallet,”as if one walks around with unassigned slots in one’s wallet.”

We also chose to use a Raspberry Pi, basically a computer that fits in your pocket, for our mother board because it has WiFi that works well with eduroam around campus and because it has USB ports that make it easy to use. It also has Bluetooth capabilities and a plethora of accessories that are designed to be compatible with the Raspberry Pi.

Along with the Bill of Materials, multiple potential algorithms for the software operations were presented. They ranged from a simple pass or fail technique to a complex system of pass-codes and card scanning. The actual algorithm has not been chosen yet, but it was agreed that each one was satisfactory.

The Housing team has yet to give any feed back, and we anxiously await their plan. It’s sure to be spectacular.

 

We’ve been working on CATS for 4 weeks now. We’ve made a lot of progress, and we’re working very hard to ensure that we properly manage and design our prototypes. Our Product Manager, Brad Hord, has greatly assisted us in working through the best practices laid out in “Product Design and Development” by Ulrich and Eppinger.

At our first meeting we worked through defining our problem, and performing background research. We recognized that the problem we are trying to solve can be broken up into two parts:

1. Need for a system to control the use of machines
2. Need for a simple common identity among our users

Over the next few meetings we brainstormed possible needs, anonymously ranked all of our needs, and then brainstormed concepts based on the needs, and anonymously ranked the concepts.

This week we discussed the rankings of our concepts, and analyzed what aspects of each concept resulted in their rankings. We then generated requirements for our prototype based upon the results of our needs, and concepts rankings.

The members of the team then self-divided into a hardware, software, and housing team. The teams were then tasked with generating a prototype BOM, algorithm block diagram, and an enclosure mock-up.

 

Next week we will discuss the different prototype proposals, and we will finalize the design for the CATS Alpha model.