Eric Zech: Individual Blog

At the beginning of ME 250 was very annoyed with the class. I didn’t think our assignments were contributing to manufacturing and design process. I actually regretted signing up for this class as a technical elective. However, as the class progressed I began to have a greater appreciation for what we were doing and came to really like the class.
The amount of physics we had to do in the beginning did not make sense to me. I though the class was about building and design. Later on, we began to build our robot and I understood the importance of the physics and analysis before the building. Physics is part of design and this became very apparent when we realized our arm did not have enough torque. We didn’t account for enough weight for the steel arm and had to gear everything down in order to allow the arm to rotate. If we had done better analysis prior to building, we would have saved time trying to fix this and could have improved another part of our machine.
The CAD design and manufacturing was also very rewarding. Being able to design something on a computer and then going through the process and being able to see a finished project was very rewarding. The moment we finally got our arm to rotate and extend without problems was one of my happiest of the semester. I am very glad I took this course and I think I learned a lot about the amount of work needed to make something great.
Working in a team was very helpful for this project. We all had different ideas and were able to mesh our ideas into a final project. Seeing things from other’s points of view and working in teams is very important and was a very beneficial part of the course. As a team we were able to work through any issues we had encountered and eventually came together in the end to make a completed, working machine.
Time management was a bit of an issue for our team. My knee surgery and other conflicts that arose during the term made it difficult to meet deadlines. Although we did meet all of the milestones, we had to spend a lot of hours trying to get it done. Looking back, I would have taking beginning design ideas more seriously so we didn’t have to struggle to solve these issues in the end. This would have made meeting deadlines less stressful for our team.
Overall I was happy with the course. I think some of the beginning assignments did not contribute well to our final project and I think the lectures should be more focused on example design processes. It would have also been helpful if the project had more focus in lectures and not just discussion. I think groups would have produced better machines if this had been the case. I also found I had to learn a lot of the CAS on my own because lab went too fast for me to keep up and learn the program.
Looking back, I think ME 250 will help me in the future as a Chemical Engineer. If I could go back and retake the course I would have tried to be more creative with ideas to win the competition early on in the design process. After watching the actual competition, I think a good design would have been to grab balls on my side (including the heavy balls) and simply dumped them out of play because most teams couldn’t mess with any of the heavy balls. I think we would have done better in the competition if this had been the issue.