This week marked only a week and a half away from the Makeathon! In class we heard from the Social Innovation Center at the university discussing the opportunities we have to pursue our projects after the course is over. The Social Innovation Center helps run the iVenture Accelerator – a 10 week summer accelerator that helps student start-ups get the mentorship and funding they need to make their vision a reality. The program is full-time during the summer, but then continues throughout the entire school year with bi-weekly meetings for guidance and furthering your vision. Unfortunately, I am a senior so I will not be able to be a main player furthering a project since I will have to start work. However, the opportunities presented in class to us were really incredible and showed the immense support that the University has for students who want to pursue their own ideas.
After this presentation, we had the opportunity to speak with Milestone Labs. They seemed pleased with our work so far but we were not able to show them the sketches and prototypes that we had made that they had seen an earlier week due to technical difficulties so they did not give us particularly detailed feedback. Overall, they suggested that we move forward in creating our design in a CAD software and print smaller scaled versions to understand how the pieces would play together and iterate more. I included the original prototypes we created below for reference.
Since we created those prototypes, we have made some edits to our design based on feedback from Jenna, Marsha, and others. Two of my teammates were able to meet with William this Friday to discuss our design in further detail. Coming out of that meeting, they had created a more in-depth sketch with some of the tweaks we had been discussing over the past few weeks, along with some suggestions from Michael.
This is the type of texture and movement that is sketched in the “foot” of our sketch. 
This sketch shows a few changes, namely a hinge for the ankle to allow movement, a textured and flexible foot to be more realistic in its movement, and a few different foot shapes as visible to the right. From our discussions with Jenna, a circular base may be the best route.
William also suggested using a flexible material in some parts of the design. He mentioned “printing on top” of one design to do this. Our team was unfamiliar with this concept so I did a bit of digging to understand how this would be possible and what that entailed. This video was very helpful in understanding how printers with multiple extruders, but also mentions how to make things using multiple materials with a normal 3D printer. Each piece would just have to be printed separately if we did not have access to a multi-extruder printer from my understanding.
Our next steps will be to create our design in a computer-aided design software. Unfortunately, this technical skill is not any of our expertise, so we are having trouble getting this actually created. Hopefully this week in class we will be able to sit down with someone who has more know-how on this topic to help us create the file so that we can print a scaled design and understand what works and what needs to be changed!
Hi Samantha,
I think your team should check out the TinkerCad gallery. You can search through tons of designs that are already completed and download them or change them to fit the purpose of your project. I don’t know if you would find exactly what you are looking for but it is a good place to start. Good luck during the Make-A-Thon!
Hi Samantha, I also think the opportunity that mentioned by our guest speaker is really great. Maybe some people in our class will finally further on improving their products and introduce it to the market. It’s really great to see the designing of your product. sometimes, you can gain more ideas by just sketching around on the paper. I really should do it more often to have a more specific idea about my product. For the difficulty that you met, maybe you can reach out to some art & design major students in our class or outside of our class. They might have more experience and knowledge in that field. I also realized the importance of knowing how to do designing in softwares like Fusion 360. Good luck with your project and see you at class.
Hi Samantha,
It sounds like you guys made a lot of progress on your prototype! I suggest asking to see if you could get one of the Fab Lab students on your team since they may have more experience with 3D modeling as well as creating with different types of materials (they had a lot more projects – and more open-ended ones! – than us to get familiar with the different tools we’ll be working with. Additionally, I know that we’ll have tool training during variety of different times throughout the weekend, so you will definitely be able to ask a lot of experts a lot more about how to use the programs during the Make-a-thon as well! Otherwise, great job, I can’t wait to see how your team does during the Make-a-thon!!
Hi Sam!
It looks like you guys have been putting some great work into your prototype! If your team is concerned about your CAD knowledge, it may be helpful to check out tutorial videos on youtube! I know we had to do quite a few with class, but I have found the more videos I watch on the different softwares, the quicker I am able to pick up the using the interface. A lot of them have super quick demos to speak about specific took. Lars Christensen, the guy who helped us make the box, has a whole channel dedicated to it! Good Luck!!