Prototyping

Construction: 

This pretotype is made using wood 2x4's with a laser engraved name in the front. The bins are made of laser cut wood and hang by one bolt at each end connected to a link in the bike chain. This chain is looped around an upper and lower sprocket, the lower of which is driven on its axle, done either by a crank or by motor. Our initial version of the pretotype used a crank, although we ran into issues of moving too fast, damaging the machine, and accessibility factors. Because of this we changed to a motor driven design adding a motor and switch to the assembly (seen right).

Narrowing of Target Market:

This prototype along with judge comments from our mid-semester design review caused us to re-evaluate our target market. We went and sampled a variety of people to see if they thought the product would be best to market to at-home consumers (solo buyers in garages) or small-scale job shops. Our results clearly showed that we should pivot our target market and focus this design around the home consumer buyer. This makes our target market people who are working in their garages, have unused vertical space, and want a high-end storage solution.

Testing:

We want to make sure our design is capable of meeting a few specifications. For this, we have done some misc testing on the device. The main test is durability and reliability, for this, we have spun the prototype at various speeds to see how the bins interact and how the chain works. We have found at high speeds the bins hit the device and can damage or drop their contents, meaning we need to make sure the product operates at slower speeds. we also found that the chain occasionally comes off. This is a problem still being worked on by improving alignment and chamfering the sprockets we have. In a final design these two issues would be important to think about. 

User Clinic:

We wanted to test with people in our target market. To do this, we ensured that the people we interviewed were at-home hobbyists. In our case, this was a lot of engineers, which is a convenient group of people for us to get a large sample of. We interviewed a group of people to get their inputs on design features such as the transparent trays and their opinions on the overall design. The video is below.

Takeaways:

From this prototype, we learned a lot about our product and consumers. 

• We learned that the product is best targeted toward an at-home buyer

• We learned that the product needs to be more resistant to failure (chain derailment, and bin spilling) than it currently is

• We learned that people enjoy and find the motor system easy, fun, and intuitive.

• We learned that people want the product to be taller (this prototype was only to show that a final version could be taller). 

  • Some people want to use the product on top of a shelf, bench, or existing workspace around the chest level

  • Some people want to use the product from floor to ceiling to help them grab low things too.