Pill Cutter - Progress Blog 5: 2/5/2022

Hello and welcome back to our team's first blog post of 2022! We are the University of Houston's Mechanical Engineering Capstone Team 35: Progress Blog 5.

First off, we would like to talk about the work our team has conducted from January 19th to February 5th, 2022. Thus far, we have completed the search for vendors of raw materials and measuring instruments. We also fabricated some critical components of the device that will need to be evaluated. The functionality of these parts needs to be ensured before manufacturing the whole device. The 3D-printed parts that have been fabricated are depicted down below, these include the multi-shapes disk, the cutting mechanism arm, and the device base.

Figure 1: Top View of Fabricated Parts

Figure 2: Isometric View of Fabricated Parts

Next, we would like to address a recent challenge the team has faced. The main obstacle is fabricating the device's blade, as a mechanist is unavailable until late February. This issue was potentially resolved during the first instructor meeting with our professor Dr. Chang, as she has offered to help fabricate the blade after she completes her plasma-cutting training.

As for the working period between February 6 and February 19, we will have a meeting with Dr. Chang once again to see if her training has been completed. If Dr. Chang has completed her training, our team will ask her to help fabricate the blade for us. Otherwise, we will need to start looking towards other alternatives. After that, we will begin to evaluate the blade in addition to the parts we already have to ensure the final device assembly is correct. The team plans to have the device fully assembled and ready for validation by February 27th.