Week 7 - Project Selection and Design Competition Update

Activities for Lecture 7

  • Review and discussion of projects for ME 492 and ME 493
  • Demonstration of joystick input control for DC motors
  • Defining customer requirements for a design project.

Reading

Review Chapter 4 in the textbook by Mattson and Sorenson. In addition, the following sections from part 2 of the textbook will be useful.

  • Competitive Benchmarking
  • Interviews
  • Literature search
  • Observational studies
  • Patent searches
  • Quality function deployment
  • Requirements matrix
  • Surveys

Status of Projects for ME 492-493

  1. Bid proposals are due by 5:00 PM on November 9.
  2. GWR will use a Qualtrics survey to solicit student preferences for projects
  3. Using input from the Bid Proposals and Qualtrics survey, GWR will assign teams for ME 492-493
  4. At the end of ME 491, each student team will submit a proposal for to describe their approach to solving the design problem Students participating in ECE teams will also have to write a proposal.

Demonstration of using a Joystick to control DC motors

To help students build their device for the design competition, a demonstrate system was created to show how an inexpensive joystick can be used for open-loop control of two DC motors.

Defining Customer Requriements

In week 7 we circle back to the start of the phase-gate design process: Opportunity Development.

In the model used by Mattson and Soreson, Opportunity Development is the first phase

  1. Opportunity development
  2. Concept development
  3. Subsystem engineering
  4. System refinement
  5. Producibility refinement
  6. Post-release refinement

The primary goal of opportunity development is to understand the design problem to be solved. In this preliminary phase, the team should not put energy into creating solutions. Ideas for solutions will naturally emerge as the team meets and discusses the problem. However, at this stage, the team needs to spend its creative energy trying to understand the problem from the customer's perspective.



Document updated 2017-11-19.