MANY UPS AND DOWNS BUT ALMOST THERE
This prototyping week has been up and down. It’s started off with a meeting where we discussed what kind of work we were supposed to do in order to accomplish our deliverables for Thursday’s presentations. The most important deliverables were casing for the laparoscopic training kit, a PCB design for the neonatal monitor and image processing system for the vein finder. I was assigned with designing the neonatal monitors PCB. This was an interesting experience because I knew nothing about PCB design. I started off with some YouTube videos on how to design these circuits which took me the whole day to understand and grasp the concept.
On Tuesday I started off with designing the PCB I used easyEDA online to accomplish this task and because I was new to PCB designing it ended up taking all day but at the end of the day I designed a whole PCB circuit.
On Wednesday I started off simulating the circuit and realized it had so many errors. I had to try a different method of designing but it didn’t work out so I had to work with the one I made and worked on perfecting it. In the evening the design was complete and ready for printing. We were going to use the voltera to print our circuit but sadly no one knew how to use the machine.
On Thursday we started again with the Voltera but were still unable to use it so we called Jacob Mtimilira to come assist us with the machine. Apparently it had faults meaning we couldn’t print a PCB for our neonatal monitor. Our presentations ended up going wrong because we didn’t deliver what we were supposed to deliver because of equipment issues.
Friday came and we just continued prototyping and testing our prototypes. All in all it was a very tough week but we made it through.