This week, the team worked on full system integration leading up to our internal “MVP” — that is, all systems work to some extent, but all working together. The Kettle + PID loop and the 3D gantry can be controlled wirelessly, and we got a new pump, characterized it, and verified that it has enough power to prime itself.
At this point, all major systems are in an operating state, so next week we will work on assembling everything together so that we can start tuning the controls — this is important, as factors like height difference between the water reservoir and the nozzle can have an impact on flowrate.
The highest risk at the moment is ensuring that our current design meets the design requirements — for that reason, as we tune, we will start checking off on most of these requirements so that we can identify early if anything needs to be modified.
Extra: note on System Validation
We need to ensure that our product, as defined by our design requirements, meets the use case requirements that we defined early on in the semester. To do this, we plan on creating a simplified survey with a clear, measurable metric for each of our use case requirements, and we will try to collect as much field data as possible to determine if there are any areas that need to be improved from the consumer’s side.