Last week, I submitted purchase requests for the items in my initial testing BOM so that they could be ordered on Tuesday 2/15 and hopefully arrive on 2/17. During the stretch from 2/13 – 2/17, I worked on developing a testing plan such that when the components arrived I would already know what tests I needed to perform to assess the quality of these initial parts.
These initial tests can be found here: test_plans_01
I retrieved the components in the afternoon of 2/17 and everything matched my expectations other than the Neoprene rubber sheets. Specifically, the Neoprene seems less rigid than I anticipated, which isn’t a catastrophic or even a particularly large issue, but this does mean that the drum pads should be made thinner than originally planned to avoid too much loss of force as the pads compress. To compensate, I now plan on placing a rigid material (such as plastic) under the neoprene to create extra drum thickness without losing much more force.
On 2/18, I spent most of the day editing the design presentation slides that pertained to the hardware sections of the presentation so that we could receive feedback over the weekend. Unfortunately, this took longer than expected and so I didn’t have time to perform the tests yesterday (2/18). My current plan is to perform these tests later today (2/19), and if I finish early I may be able to edit this report before midnight.
For the next week, I’d like to finish all outstanding tests I have planned, develop and perform any new tests I deem necessary based on the results of those tests, and begin designing a 3D model of the drum pad prototype using Fusion 360.