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Carolyn’s Status Report for 2/14/26

This week, my primary task was to update the design of our pill box based on the feedback we received from our TA and professor.  The opening mechanism of the compartments was improved upon with push to open, as well as the compartments themselves. In our original design, we realized that the last pills would not have been dispensed if they were sitting in a corner of the area.  I have updated the design to form each compartment in a way that forces all pills to be dispensed, with a funnel-like shape.  Additioanlly we are adjusting the size of each pill compartment to fit a 90-day supply of the largest average pill size we are accommodating.  I redrew our design based on these specs, as well as updating the tasks we will have to accomplish for the new design and our Gantt chart.

We are currently on schedule with the project timeline.  We updated our design plan based on feedback from our professor.  After our design presentation, we will receive plenty of feedback, using that, hopefully, we will make final adjustments and start implementing strongly.

Next week, I plan to draw the laser-cutting file design for the box and start printing it out.  I want to have the physical peieces are soon as possible so see if the design needs to be iterated.

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Carolyn’s Status Report for 2/7/26

This week my primary task was to gather our ideas to prepare for the testing, tasks and schedual part of our proposal.  I refined the testing ideas/metrics  I made in our abstarct.  They needed to be usedated based on the feeback we recieveved on our MVP from Theophilus and Amelia.  The updates MVP also changed what was most important we test for.  Furthermore I worked with my teamates to figure out a task breakdown that worked for us given our skills.  Then I detailed the indiculas steps we each should be taking for our project and created a Gannt chart.  Then I worked to create a list of items we will need.  The most expensive of which was the FPGA which we need to configure to control all the gate motors we will use.  Since FPGAs cost so much I knew it would be better if we could borrow one from the inventory, so I filled out an inventory item request form.

We  are on scheduale, after much iteration with Theophilus we have gotten to a place where our defined MVP is satisfactory and well alligned to our use case.  Our inventory request was also processed and so we have the FPGA we need.

In the next week I mainly want to work on finializing our parts list.  Doing so will force me to account fo everything we need so we are adequaltly prepared.  Additioanlly I want to start CADing our pill box design.  As I know mechanical design is often very time consuming since prototypes need to be created to testing things out, this is not a task that can be pushed to later.