Jordan Schultz

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I are working diligently to finish of the semester strong with our final presentation. We finished the build of the model on Tuesday and so we hope that the frame looks good enough and works well enough that we can transition onto the presentation and finish strong. Reflecting on this week, the team is ready to go and we think we've put together something that will be great. 5/6-5/10

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I have got a couple of things going so far. After I picked up the purlins at Deking, as well as the fasteners, Patrick started to work on a game-plan for cutting and adjusting all the components to start building the frame. Along with some help from Francisco and I, the project is starting to take shape and it is impressive. Reflecting on this week, I hope we have enough push in us to be able to finish this semester with a project that works. 4/29-5/3

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I work diligently to acquire all the parts to start construction of the solar rack. I also met with Dr. Furman this week to discuss a game plan to help my current progress in this class and I am going to take all the things he told me in stride to make sure I can get some engineering done for this project. Reflecting on this week, I am frustrated, but I will look towards the final goal and put my feelings aside. 4/22-4/26

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I are coming off a week of a presentation that we think has been the best it has ever been. Continuing, we will take Dr. Furman's recommendations for work that we still need to complete as well as working on tasks that we believe are necessary to this project that may have not shown up yet in our talks. We have our plan set up on slack, and we will continually work though the next could of weeks to make sure that we get something impressive built. 4/15-4/19

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I are coming off of spring break with some great ideas for moving forward. Francisco met with Dr. Furman earlier in the week to gather an idea on which direction we need to be heading, and Dr. Furman has been invaluable for helping us push our work to the next level. We plan to keep this momentum going as we are finalizing a design for the presentation. Reflecting on this week, I have felt incredibly motivated for this project, and I am glad we're getting work done at a quick pace. 4/8-4/12

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I presented more ideas to Dr. Furman in hopes of getting an idea that would stick. Luckily for us we had an idea that inspired some discussion that puts us on a good path, drawing inspiration from car ports and a cad drawing from Francisco. Reflecting on this week, this is a good chance to start rolling with the ideas so we can have a good presentation when we come back from break. 3/25-3/29

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I continue bouncing ideas off of Dr. Furman and Mr. Swenson to identify which route we need to follow for this project. One of the main tasks that we'll need to have planned for the next week will be a solidworks model and maybe some prototype model made out of cardboard. Reflecting on this week, we still have a lot of work, but I am hopeful moving on. 3/18-3/22

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I continue on just thinking of concepts for the re-scoped portion of our project. Dr. Furman was impressed with the couple of ideas that we had come up with for last week, and so we are looking for more creative ideas as well as finding other needed values for this project, like wind loading, solar panel frame profile, and other things. Reflecting on this week, I am glad we're getting back on track and I hope we can finish strong. 3/11-3/15

This week Francisco, Patrick and I had a meeting with Dr. Furman about a re-scoping of the current project. This re-scoping just focuses on the mounting mechanism for the project, so the team has been tasked to come up with several ideas on how to combat this problem. Pulling back down the project to this point was not the idea situation that I would have liked to have happened, but now that we're at this point, the best thing to do is move forward and put together some great ideas for this project nevertheless. 3/4-3/8

This week, Patrick and I brainstormed the final things that we need to have in line in order to have success with the presentation. The ideas that we then decided on would be assigned via our team chat on slack. We also discussed with Ralion about some things that he could help us do to help us out in our preparation. With the presentation coming up quickly, we'll have a lot on our plate, but we are prepared for the challenges ahead. 2/25-3/1

This week, Francisco and I met with Dr. Furman and Mr. Swenson to brush up our design requirements so that we have some great news to share during the first round of presentations for this semester. Some things that we touched upon were the aesthetics of the project, which the team has been looking for ways to quantify this result, mainly because the idea of something "looking good" has a different definition to everyone. We decided to create a public pole that gathers public consensus on the frame, and see if we can use this data to help our project in any way. Reflecting on this week, I feel like the team has a good idea of where we need to go next, and with some specific ideas now implanted in our game plan, we will prepare for the coming two weeks. 2/18-2/22

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I met with Ralion, a San Jose State mechanical engineering student who works at a Solar PV frame manufacturer, to come up with ideas furthering our current design, as well as receiving valuable advice from someone with industry experience. He will continue to give us great ideas while the team itself is trying to prepare the finished product of the solar panel frame. Reflecting on this week, I feel fairly confident that the direction of the team will be great in the coming weeks. Even at our stumbling trying to figure out how we should move as we change scenery. 2/11-2/15

This beginning week of the semester, Francisco, Patrick, and I worked together to get the team on track after the big move from the old warehouse to the new facility. We also are spending some time brainstorming where we can improve our old ideas from last semester as to not sound stale while we are coming up to finalizing our ideas. Reflecting on this week, we will have to work very hard to keep on track for the coming weeks as production and manufacturing our Solar PV frame is not too far away. 2/4-2/8

This week Francisco, Patrick, and I took it relatively easy, as classes are transitioning into finals. After Finals comes and goes, we will dedicated our valuable time to creating a solid final report for ME 195a and pack up this project for the semester. We have been in talks to continue working over the break to continue brainstorming ideas / questions needed to be addressed as well as making up for loss time when we had difficulties earlier this semester. With luck, the next semester is looking bright for us. 12/3-12/7

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I worked on our presentation and presented it to the rest of the Superway Teams. This presentation went by smoothly I felt and was probably our best presentation to date. I think the main reason why was that we prepared for questions beforehand as well as took prior questions given to us by Dr. Furman and Mr. Swenson, and made sure we addressed them in our presentation. Moving forward, I think we have a lot still to work on, but we are on track and I am hopeful for the next semester. Reflecting on this week, preparedness help us out in the long-run, and I think we should keep sticking to that philosophy. -11/26-11/30

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I approached Dr. Furman with questions to figure out where we should direct ourselves the week before Thanksgiving. Letting us know some good information, like trying multiple solutions for the canopy instead of 1, getting in contact with a couple of companies to understand what we're working with, and being aware of many different ideas and questions we weren't asking ourselves definitely helped. Along with this, the team seems to be finally getting out of our rough phase with being out of sync, tasks not being completed, and general mis-communication, which will greatly improve our progress in the coming weeks. Reflecting on this week, I think we should have more sources for ideas instead of one, because if the one idea doesn't work as well as intended, then we're in trouble. 11/12-11/16 - Jordan Schultz

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I focused on new ways to keep the momentum of our project going. We are currently transitioning from our designing to FEA and small scale testing to get a better understanding of mounting our solar panel frame onto the guide way and attaching the panels to our frame. I am planning to incorporate the FEA portion into my ME 160 project so that I can develop a better answer for the analysis, while having more heads to discuss improvements to the design. The small scale is still in progress, and I am just waiting for some 3d printing parts to be provided by Brandon Tartar. In the realm of team dynamics, all 3 of us in the team have taken a group dynamic quiz provided in ME 180 to figure out our team strengths and how to work with those strengths. With this in mind we are planning to continue working hard into Thanksgiving break and beyond. My reflections for  this week boil down to work past the disagreements and stalemates in the group to get some i...

This week, Francisco, Patrick, and I were continuing our design specifications in collaboration with the guideway team and the wayside team, along with coming from a meeting with Mr. Swenson and Dr. Furman. The ideas we got from our meeting is pushing us to get into contact with SolarCity to inquire about their current designs and see if there are any opportunities to get sponsorship from them for this project. In the meantime, we are working diligently to get our assembly done this next week so that the guideway team can make suggestions to us, while we can continue to do FEA analysis on the structure design we have chosen. From this, we can evaluate and decide if some portions of the frame need to be strengthened. We will also be be incorporating small scale models of our design in the next couple of weeks, with assistance from Brandon Tartar of the Full-Scale Bogie team. Reflecting on this past week, I think the team is handling the increase of work rather well, and by the end of th...

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