The weekend before week 4 was definitely my favorite. Professor Bisesti gave us a 4 day weekend, which allowed us to plan and go on an excursion to Manuel Antonio. Although a 4-hour bus drive away, and some pretty last-minute planning, we were able to find a great Airbnb that fit everyone and costs only $30/night/person.
Elliot, Madison, and I went down to the beach on the first day, since we wanted to scout out potential spots that we could all enjoy. We say some capuchins along the way, and got some great photos!
When we got down to the beach, I was already tired from hanging in the pool all day, so I didn’t elect to get in the water, but while I was on the beach I saw some dogs munching on some coconut meat. I took it upon myself to give them their next meal, so I cracked open a coconut, drank the water, and harvested the meat to feed to the dogs (this took me an hour with rocks, thank the lord for modern tools).
The next day, Madison and I took advantage of the chance to surf at one of the best surfing beaches in Manuel Antonio, with a cheap board rental of only $20/day!
After a relaxing long weekend, we headed back to San Jose and jumped right back into prototyping. During the third phase of our project, things got pretty interesting. We worked towards system integration, bringing together everyone’s contributions. With the guidance of Professor Bisesti, we tackled the tricky issue of negative fill in Rhinoceros 3D. But then came a challenge with the Carbon3D lattice structures and the Prusa 3D Printers. Rhino said everything was cool, but the Prusa slicer kept giving us an open edges error.
No worries, though. We put our heads together and made a game-time decision to go old school for layer 3 instead of the fancy lattice structure. It messed with the airflow and the automatic pressure purge, but we hustled and got that print done just in time. Layer 4 threw some more curveballs with the NinjaFlex material, so we switched gears and used PLA instead. Eventually, we had to say goodbye to layer 4 and find a different approach.
But it wasn’t all struggle. Seeing those components fit perfectly in the pelican case was awesome. We went to town modifying that case, carving out a slot for the touch screen and a speaker grill. We even tweaked the universal cap to handle two tubes to keep things clean and clog-free.
As we put everything together, we couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride. Our team, Leo, Sumin, and I made some serious progress with the Negative Pressure Wound Therapy device. Sure, there’s room for improvement, but we’re stoked that future teams will build on what we’ve done and deliver a great prototype to our clients in Brazil.