Micro Challenge 2¶
We documented our challenge here: https://hackmd.io/icRvNbICS3CQQttGLKlH5w
In this challenge, we aimed to bring together some elements we’ve built earlier (water quality assessment, lipid seperator) and built some new components. (bio filter, vortex)
I designed a system map as below in the beginning of the challenge on how these elements could come together in a functional and meaningful way, but we proceeded with building a much more simple version to scope the work to a single week. It turned out to be a good decision as we’ve spent much more time on making the vortex work, which we had assumed to be a simple development. Also CNC work took much longer than we assumed to design a model, then redesign it, then prepare it for cutting and then finally cut, sand and assemble.
I remembered again that it’s usually not suffient to just end the work where things just work, but there’s a lot of extra mile to go to situate it nicely, create adequate packaging, making it user friendly, etc. This is significant amount of additional work that you don’t always foresee. This happened to us when we wanted to make the vortex work with a single button, but building a circuit to gradually increase the speed of the motor didn’t work in our tries, so we had to keep manually increasing the speed.
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All in all, it was an intense production sprint, we produced something that doesn’t fully work as a system - there’s no water connection between the filter and the vortex and vice versa, but it was a good learning experience that could be taken further by working on the system integrations.
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