Week 1: Congregation of Shitty Engineers

All:

Idea planning

Fields of particular interest

Daniel:

Meeting times

Idea criteria

Website

In the first week, we were tasked with

• Build Website (Done)

• Idea

Now, the first requirement is easy was straightforward. The second one though... Our revered former TA who continues to haunt us, Logan, said that "Half of a capstone is getting the idea down". Upon receiving the team placements Tuesday night, we immediately coordinated a time to meet. The soonest we could was in the middle of Wednesday. I prepared a list of what I wanted to go over in the initial meeting.

While much of the meeting was devoted to discussing project ideas, it was important do some initial administrative work. For me, it was essential to create weekly times where we could all work on the projects and set up a communication channel to facilitate work and productivity in the coming weeks. We decided that deciding specific roles such as treasurer and website manager would be taken care of later after solidifying an idea.

On Thursday of this first week, we would talk to Professor Patel and the TAs about several ideas we had. This contained ideas from what we discussed on Wednesday and things we thought up that night. Below is a list of ideas.

Daniel's criteria for ideas were:

1. Clear (and useful) objective

2. Can implement in 10 weeks

3. Fun/meaningful to build and design

We found that some ideas were too simple (GPS tracker), and some were far too difficult (digital pen), and some were maybe too mechanical. There was one however, which hit a sweet spot: the dog shit. We wanted to devote the next 10 weeks to building something that picked up dog shit. It had a clear and useful goal. We think we can implement a robot to do this within 10 weeks. And hopefully it will be fun to build!

On Friday, we wanted to research this idea a bit further.

In the parts list, we found that there were 2 main parts. There was the chassis and the sensors/processor. We looked into good chassis which would be robust, customizable, and can traverse dirt.

The promised details:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzokegCSY6auUlJkNDdOeDVHMlE

We knew that dog poop contained urea and urea emits UV light (shoutouts to Patel) so we want to use a UV light sensor as our main sensor. We currently do not know if a 'Black Light' is necessary as the black light shines the urea in the visible light spectrum.

Also, if we were to use UV sensors, we need to be able to test it. It is impractical (and rude) to bring dog poop into the lab spaces so we needed an alternative method of testing. Where is there a reservoir of something poopy near the Electrical Engineering Building... Geese poop by Drumheller! There is so much geese poop around the fountain, it puts the Guano Islands to shame. However geese poop contains uric acid, more so than urea. We tried to see whether or not uric acid would emit UV light and our conclusion is... we think so? So in the coming days, we want to test our hypothesis and adjust our development plan accordingly.

Have fun following us Shitty Engineers!

Weekly MVE: Daniel, for coordinating and getting the ball rolling