Jordan Schultz

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I were asked to develop a more specified plan of our design specifications to get ourselves back onto track and to start asking the right questions when it came to thinking ahead for this project. With this plan in mind we put to work and have started to learn more things about how we should be presenting our project for presentation 3, as well as trying to figure out how to use our time more effectively so that we won't find ourselves in this situation again. From what I could see, we need to be more clear on all the steps that we take in our design progress. We have to keep everything well documented, because although everyone in the team knows what steps we're going to take next, not everyone else would know that just looking at us. We hope to take this lesson to heart and to develop a better presentation next time, especially one that looks more well prepared than this last one. I have also learned, from being team lead, that it is difficu...

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I all continued work on producing a design for the mount in Solidworks, while working on calculations to set our boundaries. Interesting things that I have found this week in relation to a design is about changing the orientation of the panels to allow for more panels to be fit onto the model. This is all done with the current specifications from Mr. Swenson, but I have also gotten into contact with the guideway team lead to figure out the outside specifications of the track just to learn if there is a possibility of changing the size of the current model. If not, it might be in consideration to change the panel orientation. Reflecting on this week, I have found that just sitting around with concepts and models do help when it comes to improving a design or making a process more efficient. -Jordan Schultz

This week Francisco, Patrick, and I all decided to focus our energy onto a specific part of the project, instead of branching off to doing to our own individual portions of the project. We felt like we were not getting anywhere. Along with this, we finally got around to getting a weekly meeting set-up so that we could get tasks accomplished outside of the allotted time for ME 195a. This meeting helped immensely because we could finally meet without the distractions that the class may offer and just focus on what we need to do. While frustrated that I, as team lead, could not get these meetings running sooner, I am glad that we actually made some progress with our project. We also plan to do some hand-calculations for FEA of the current solar panel mount just to understand what we are working with on a more technical and mathematically rooted way, and I will be spearheading this portion. Reflecting on this week, if we continue to work like this, I see no issues in being able to create a...

This week Francisco, Patrick, and I really felt like we go the ball rolling with ideas for the project. We met with Dr. Furman, Mr. Swenson, and Professor Igor, along with Mr. Albulet to discuss about moving forward with a truss design to create a more professional solar panel mount than last year's team. They focused a lot on designing the truss and that ate up their time, so the build quality was a degree lacking in terms of professionalism. We are hoping with the truss system from Mr. Swenson's colleague, Brad Diaz, we can focus more on keeping the aesthetics of the mount intact. We also discussed with Mr. Albulet on different ways to paramaterize Solidworks so that we could try a various amount of designs without having to change every detail of the model. Reflecting from this week, everyone in the team is energized with this new plan, and we are going to go forward and focus on building a clean design for the solar panels. -Jordan Schultz