Project Management

Summary

WalkON! has finished all the required deliverables noted on the 'Home' page as Complete. By planning all of the tasks out ahead of time we were able to distribute the workload evenly and ahead of schedule in many cases. The weekly meetings and group text messages helped to keep everyone in constant communication on the project and ensure that everyone is accountable for his/her portion of the deliverables. The Gantt chart was updated to reflect some additional items that needed to be addressed and some dates needed to altered in order to comply. By building in a considerable timer buffer to some tasks at project kickoff, the overall timeline is currently still good. One area of small concern moving forward is the ordering our purchase items. Orders need to be placed as soon as possible and ideally prior the costs being effected by any possible worldwide tariff regulations that may be coming. The plan is to have all of the purchase items ordered prior to March 16, 2018 so that fabrication of the custom parts can begin on March 26, 2018.

Updates

4/24/18 - WalkON! has met all the due dates for the Design Review Report, Design review Presentation, Prototype Review and Economic and Environmental Analysis. The full scale prototype is well on its way. As of 4/15/18 the curved footplate, bent footplate, 3/4" PVC tube, 1-1/4" Aluminum tube, thigh wraps and tie rods have been completed. The bent knee rest, bent bars and Aluminum welding are scheduled to be completed the week of 4/15 thru 4/21.

The initial concerns over the costs of certain raw materials due to the possible increases in international tariffs left our raw materials unaffected. Other areas of concern had taken it's place. With some of the commercially parts being harder to acquire than initially thought, we have had to look into all avenues for possible purchase. Due to the availability, cost and quantities required for some of our commercially available parts, we needed to look into alternate avenues of acquiring these parts. We needed to purchase the following parts at Home Depot; 1” loop clamps, 1” pipe caps, flanged bolts & hex head bolts and nuts. In order to get the 1 ¼”loop clamps at a lower cost, we researched their availability in secondary markets such as ebay and Amazon. We finally ended up ordering the 1¼” loop clamps from ebay due to their availability, price and shipping costs.

WalkON! is moving towards the completion of this project with high excitement and confidence.

5/7/18 - All of the deliverables were complete on time or before due dates. We were eventually able to obtain some of the less available commercially available components. One small item that came up on the fabricating end of things was our inability to bend the 3/16" thick AL 6061 plate at a 90 degree angle. Upon trying to assemble the prototype it was found that due to the bending of the plate that our slotted holes no longer lined up with the curved foot plate due to the distortion from bending. With time constraints, we therefore needed to remake the slotted foot plate without any bends. Two more welds, painting and complete assembly are planned to be completed by 5/9/18 at 5pm. Overall, the project was a success, with considerable learning's on all fronts.