I learned a lot in ME 250 this semester. I came into the class excited because I was really interested in using CAD to design something, and then actually build it. I wasn’t really sure what to expect because I hadn’t talked to anyone who had taken the class before, and basically I was just ready to find out what mechanical engineering was all about.
I feel like I now have a really good idea about what I have to do to complete a design project in the future. I definitely learned a lot about the Design and Manufacturing process. I now know how to go from a general strategy, to a more focused concept, to modules of a concept that each have specific roles, and finally to the smallest components that make up the modules. I learned about FRDPARRCS and how to use them in each step of the design process to define functional requirements, design parameters, etc. I also learned about fundamental design principles such as Occam’s Razor, Accuracy, Repeatability, Resolution, and St. Venant’s Principle that helped guide my team through the design process.
I now have so much more knowledge about mechanical components and structures than I previously had. I truly feel like I can look at most mechanical devices and know or give a pretty good educated guess as to how it works, why it works, and what components were used to make it work. I can pretty much say that that is all due to this class.
I now feel confident when I walk into the machine shop. When we first started working in the shop, I didn’t remember much of what was taught during the training sessions, but after working in there as much as we did, I now know how to use every machine there. I used to think of it as the place where only the upper class mechanical engineering students worked. ME 250 completely changed my view of the shop; now I feel like I belong there just as much as the ME 450 students.
I definitely learned a lot about teamwork and time management in ME 250. I ended up in a great team. We all got along, we never fought, and I think we all worked really well together. I think some reasons for this were that we always listened to everyone’s ideas, we all did our share of work, and we were all willing to work long hours on our project.
We decided near the start of the project that we were going to try to finish as early as possible in order to have time for testing. We scheduled ourselves to finish about a week or a week and a half early. After actually starting, we weren’t sure whether or not we were going to be able to finish quite that early, but in the end we still finished before we needed to. I think setting that goal of finishing earlier than needed really helped push us to work a lot, early, and in the end I think that really played to our advantage.
I honestly think the class was structured very well. All of the homework’s had to do with our project: creativity, sketching and force analysis, materials and mechanical components, a complete mechanical device (bike) and all of the components of it, how they work together, etc, and finally the motors. At the time when I was actually doing the homework’s, it didn’t seem like there was a good purpose for them. Looking back there definitely was a purpose to them, to give us small problems to solve in each of those categories because those are the types of problems we would need to solve when designing our actually machine.
I think all of the milestones also gave us a taste of what we would need to be doing for our project. Coming up with individual strategies, concepts, and modules gave us time to think about what kinds of things would actually work and what wouldn’t work. Again, it was hard for me to understand back at the start of the class when we were coming up with these individual designs the importance of thinking of different ideas and comparing them to determine the best one.
The CAD sessions and homework’s definitely helped me because I had never used CAD before, so it was really helpful to have lab time to learn about the functions of CAD and the homework’s to practice with it.
It all was definitely a lot of work, and I definitely spent the most time working on things for this class than for any other class, but I do think that it was all worth it in the end. Everything we did had a greater purpose in teaching us something useful that we could use in designing our machines. It was hard to see the bigger picture while actually doing all of the homework’s and milestones, but looking back, I can definitely see the big picture now.
Overall, I am pretty happy with my performance in the class. I think I could have probably gotten a few more points on the homework’s if I went to the office hours more, and other than that the only thing is if our machine worked a little better.
I think we had a good strategy of going for the heavy balls, and I think it was good that our machine was so different from everyone else’s. One thing I think we could have done better was to take our idea of a “hopper” (the cage that the balls went into) and come up with different concepts for it. If we had came up with multiple ideas for what exactly was on the bottom of the cage that allowed the balls to enter into the cage but prevented them from falling out of the cage, and then compared them to determine which would work the best, I think we might have had more success in the competition.
Our machine moved the way we intended for it to move; the leadscrew drove the scissor arms really well, and the cart was able to drive back and forth. It was just the hopper, specifically that the hopper was split up into rigid columns, so the balls in the arena didn’t perfectly line up with the columns in the hopper. We thought the hopper would move the balls around until they did line up with the hopper columns.
When I tried picking up balls with just the scissor linkage-hopper mechanism (before it was attached to the cart) by physically lowering it into the slot and pushing on the balls, I was able to fill up the hopper by wiggling the hopper around until the balls lined up in the columns. Once the hopper was attached to the cart, however, I wasn’t able to wiggle the hopper around quite as much (all I could do was move the cart back and forth a little). This worked in the seeding round, but it did not work in the actual competition.
Even after these mishaps with our machine, I still am very proud of it and of our team, and I am really glad that I took this class. It was a great experience and I learned a lot that will definitely help me in the future.
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