By Bao Loc Doan (Project Manager)

Introduction

The Critical Design Review presentation was supposed to be a time where the 3D SMD group could show the customer and the review board how far along we’ve gotten since the PDR. It was expected that we should have the core design aspects of the project, in manufacturing, systems, and electronics, finished and ready to present. The customer and review board gave us a debrief on areas that we could improve on and move forward. The CDR will be linked below:

Critical Design Review Presentation

Executive Summary

The customer noticed we were missing one aspect on our requirements; what is the heaviest chip that the SMD pick and place machine can pick up? It was decided that the 32U4 chip would be the heaviest, and we will be adding that to our requirements moving forward.

System Design

The weakest feature on our system design was the cabling tree. We neglected to put any cabling tree into our CDR and it dinged us considerably. We understand how important the cabling tree is to the project due to the need of an efficient and tidy cabling tree to avoid any unwanted stress on our wires which could ultimately cause failure of our project launch. A lack of a cabling tree could lead to unorganized wires which is also not very attractive to look at, and is another key point since we want our project to appeal to our customer.

Experimental Results

The format of our experimental results was confusing to the review board and the customer. One of the issues mentioned was the lack of a list of the experiments that were conducted. The 3D SMD group agrees with this assessment, and will move forward by placing an introductory list in the final documentation of the experiments conducted if we need to present anything in the future. Another issue that was brought up was that our experimental results resembled more closely to assembling certain parts rather than testing the prototypes for certain things like speed and accuracy. The 3D SMD group also agrees with this assessment.

Interface Definition

There was negligible comment in regards to improving our interface definition.

PCB

The PCB was not required for the 3D SMD group for Spring 2016.

Hardware Design

Due to the manufacturing division manager being absent at the time of our debrief, there were little comments about our hardware design. We will try to meet up with the manufacturing division manager and assess what we can do better for our final documentation. The customer did mention that there should have been the photo detection circuit model in our Solidworks. At the time of presentation, the 3D SMD group do agree with this assessment. As of right now, since we are moving towards a different design, we will not be implementing the photo detection circuit moving forwards.

Software Design

The code that we presented was a little confusing, admittedly. We had named our A-axis rotation to “B” in our Arduino modules due to compatibility issues in our JAVA GUI. We tried to make this clear in our presentation, but we can see how this can be confusing. The president also mentioned that in the future, we could show where we added each subroutine exactly into our code, which was a good idea. The reason being is that a future semester should be able to look at our software and know exactly what we changed in case Makeblock decides to update any of their software in the future. Moving forward, the 3D SMD group has decided to put comments onto our software or somehow making a visual effect (the president mentioned a program being able to highlight all changes that were done) to show any changes to the code.

Verification and Validation Test Plans

Thanks to our wonderful systems engineer, Christine H. Vu, we had no issues in this category.

Project Update

There was negligible comment in regards to improving our project update. We will try to follow our schedule and hope to have a successful launch.

Demo

Our demo did not do as well as we had hoped. The review board and customer pointed out that our “PCB” at the time was just double sided tape, our nozzle slowly reverted to original position due to it being taped on, the overall appearance of our machine was janky since everything was zip tied and electrical taped together, and said there was definite room for improvement. The 3D SMD group wholeheartedly agrees with all the comments and we hope to make the launch have none of these issues.