Meeting on 26th April 2010

We had our last official meeting with our mentor, Peter, to finalize the project. We then continued with the remaining construction work from Tuesday and spent several hours at the design factory, even up to 10:30 p.m for the Wednesday session. As you can see, we did loads of hard work behind the scene. So, I think the course assessment for our project should be 80 percent for the construction part (manual, solar concentrator, report) and 20 percent for the rest, if necessary.

Cheers

It seems that after a hard hard work and a combined team effort, the long awaited project is coming to a fruitful end. Working with you guys as a team is a life time experience that I have taken a huge lesson from. Congradulations for the work done so far and more focus and hard work for the coming presentation of our brand product Solar-Flower. I hope the team will stick together and continue to further develop the product and present it for the show on world village 2010, Finland.

Hauskaa vappua!!

Test drive

As Miina mentioned, we tested the first readymade panel in Design Factory with a spot light. The testing went quite ok, but we are still missing a simple solution for adjusting each panel. The theorys we had in our mind didn´t quite work as thought in real life. Here are few photos of what we did.The next photo is not a master piece, but you can get some idea ot the focal point.

On thursday we made cardboard exemplars of the panels to make the drawing easier. After that we draw the figures on the metallic plates and wen´t on friday to Kone department to cut them. Cutting was easy until we got the the point where we had to cut the small wedges between the cds. We will continute the work on monday/tuesday.

Eddy and me flatened the other reflective material that we collected from Engineers without boarders. As the team already disscussed, it would be a good idea to make a couple or three panels out of this material to show that we can also develop our solar concentrator from different reflective materials. I hope Eddy and me would join forces to go to the cutting station and prepare some panels today or tomorrow. And what about the gaps between the CDs on the panels? are we yet to decided on this matter?

Logo, anyone?

Now, I ain't no graphic designer, but the product needs a logo, so I thought I'd play around a little and avoid doing real things. So here's the first logo suggestion with the two name suggestions that have come up so far. Comments, please!

Problematic Panels

Today was the pre-submission of the final report i.e. our manual, and so we pre-submitted, but quite a bit is still missing. The biggest single thing seems to be the panels and instructions on how to make them. We've had some problems with them during these past days: on Wednesday morning me and Irena couldn't find the time to test the adjusting properly and after that it's been all cloudy and rainy. Today we tried to do some testing with a spotlight at Design Factory, and based on that, the manual adjusting (bending the "wings" to right angle) of a single panel works. However, I am still concerned about how to make the rest of the panels. Going through every single one of them manually is a lot of work.


Right now we know the needed angles, so in theory we could make a mould of it. However, we haven't quite figured out how that would help us. First we thought of hammering the wings to the right angle with the help of wedges or the mould, but it seemed to be quite difficult to get the angle right and precise because the needed elevation is so small (0,6 mm). If we would have access to a press in the next few days, our problems might be solved. If not, we need either a brilliant innovation quickly or long hours spent at the DF. So any ideas are now more than welcome!

Introduction and manual is sufficient

Hmm tomorrow is the deadline for the report and well, it needs not to be a big report as we have been working too much in the lab. So this should be short, simple manual of the product and introduction. We plannned to put pictures together with steps to make the concentrator. We may add some applications where it can be used but this is in the backlog. If team members have any other suggestions, they are welcome to share here.

Frame and panels design

So we started with the design of frame last week which is almost at the end now. But we still have to make panels for the concentrator. Today's plan is to go through the panels design shaping them and trying to get same focus for all. Best of Luck team.

Pickup day

Today I finished up our collection of materials. First I went to visit William, but in the corridor I bumped into Eric and we discussed shortly on how things are going with our project. He told me that he´ll come to see the presentation. William and I went to collect the reflecting metals and loaded them in to my car with the roof panels I came pu with. Then I carried all of them to Design factory, next to our other materials. So need for the gym for few days :D Now we have enough of metallic plates! Enough metallic plates to build a boat! So if want to change the plan, we could build a Buster boat XD

Oh just kiding :) So since we have good materials that are mouldable, we can try to mold the whole plate or cut them and fold each section one by one. Few things for forthcoming: The product development projects are closing up soon, so be patient in the machine room, they are as busy with their projects as we are. And William would like to see what how were doing, so he´ll visit us next week :)

BR Irena

Meeting on 12.4

The whole group had a short meeting on the schedule. We decided that this week the group will meet every day at 3 and spend few hours in the design factory and start building. On next monday we will continue after our class and on tuesday we will spend the whole day in the design factory. Working on DF on sundays is not worth of planning, since the entrance is uncertain. I will bring the metallic panels on tuesday or wednesday and we will try to make them bend. The shiny metallic plates we still have to pick up, so I´ll send an email to William and ask when one of us can collect them. If it´s possible tomorrow or wednesday, I´ll pick them up and bring them to DF so that I could compensate my absence on the end of the week.

BR Irena

Shopping

Irena, I and Teddy went for shopping today at 1530 hrs. We bought all the required stuff e.g. wood, thread rods, nutts, hinges etc but sorry Ed we could not buy your email items 7 to 10 :). Well, we did all the shopping from one big store so it was not roaming around for things but we really worked to chose the material. We hope you will find that we have purchased useful things. We remained well in budget and all the stuff cost like 190,63 euros for today's shopping. It was a narrow escape though :). We also put all the material in Design Factory and pasted page with "SGT SOLAR" so that others may know.

NOW LET THE REAL DESIGN BEGIN

Meeting in Design factory 01st April, 2010

We had a meeting with our mentor Peter on April 01, 2010 in the Design Factory. We discussed different aspects of the design and how to improve it. We came to the conclusion that the design needs to be flexible and easy to handle. We agreed on wood structure for the frame and metal for the panels. Peter pointed out that wood is not a sustainable solution as it gets destroyed by the rain and is no longer in good shape after a while.So it is better to use metal for panels instead. We also noticed that structure should have some holdings so that it can keep the panels in one position so that we could focus easily. Then there was discussion whether the distilled water is useful or harmful for drinking. So we adapted the procedure where first water will be distilled and then passed from substance that can add minerals to it making it like mineral water in the market. That is going to be our application.
Unfortunately, we are still not sure when to buy the stuff but team was confident to get all in next week. Out model for panel was good and we will continue with that. Lets see what we make.