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:
- Need for a system to control the use of machines
- 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.