This week has been spent planning and rescoping our project under these new working circumstances. Originally, I was responsible for most of the mechanical part assembly, but obviously this is now not possible since we won’t have access to Techspark and Claire and I will be working from the other side of the world.

We spent this week exploring the different CAD simulation software we could use to simulate the design of our mechanical system. I looked into Solidworks, I had some previous experience working with it from Intro to MechE but since Claire and I are both working on Macs, we concluded that Virtual Andrew had too much of a lag for us to work efficiently for the rest of the semester. In terms of schedule, we won’t be following our original Gantt chart anymore since our tasks required major rescoping.

We will be spending the next few days exploring another option, Fusion360. With initial experimentation, this software seems to be much more usable since we can run it our Macs directly. Our goal is to finish up our Statement of Work, and come up with a more detailed list of requirements and schedule of what exactly to simulate and how far we can go after spending more time on Fusion360.