Preliminary Design

Preliminary Design Review

Luke Haun Meeting #1

After sketching our first design, we met with a community expert, Luke Haun, an engineer who has been working with a company called Green Box, he has previously worked with creating containers to transport temperature sensitive medications. He looked at our sketches and we told him about materials we were thinking of using. He liked the idea of using vacuum sealed stainless steel along with the heating tape, arduino, battery combination. He then suggested we use an insulation called Pure Temp. This insulation uses the energy of phase changes of certain materials to maintain a constant temp. He also suggested we insulate the bottom of our cap. We have decided to take both of his suggestions and work with Luke to manufacture our design.

Luke Haun Meeting #2

The second time we met with Luke, he brought us Pure Temp and testing materials. He gave us recommendations on our next steps. With him we determined 3 more tests that need to be done. The first test would include testing how long the vacuum sealed canister alone could stay within the temperature range when left in a refrigerator. We would then test the canister with the pure temp and finally with the pure temp and the heat tape. This test would help us determine not only how effective our design is, but how crucial each element is to our design. We also measured the voltage going into the heat tape from our circuit. He helped us find that we are only out putting 3v rather than 9v. That let us know that in addition to an h-bridge, we will probably need to use two power sources: two 9v batteries.

Nick Sieger Meeting #1

When meeting with Nick Sieger we hoped he could provide us programming insight, because of his background in electrical engineering and computer programming. He cleaned up our code by combining two lines. He also helped us to understand how many volts are going to each port of the input section of the Arduino Uno. This will be beneficial for when we are switching to the second h-bridge. We explained to him what we were doing with the bread boarding and we together were able to make the program work without the USB connection and just running off of one battery. We plan to meet with him again to work on programming a sleep-mode so our battery life doesn't drain.

Nick Sieger Meeting #2

During the second meeting Nick met with Ella and Joe. They worked on the next major step in the coding of the project, Sleep code. All three of them did research prior to meeting on how sleep code works and the variation within sleep codes. Together they collaborated and created a solid first step in creating the sleep code.