10/25/09 Lamp Meeting

Today's meeting was a discussion meeting, to remind ourselves where the design team stands right now and where we're heading to.

Here's the list of topics we discussed:

1) Lamp critique/design
2) Goals
3) Net Impact postmortem
3) Freeplay
4) Timeline
6) Who we need

First off, major problems regarding the design were addressed. We started out with the base, which isn’t too stable right now. We decided to strengthen the current design by incorporating a cage-like structure (square tube) around the vertical tube at the base. For the main joint, we identified the problem to be the wobbly hinge that introduces a big range of motion before the peg stabilizes the horizontal tube. To solve this problem, we decided to alter the current design a little bit, by replacing the hinge with block with a hole that can fit the peg and spring in it. The bike cable will be attached directly to the peg through the spring so that it moves in and out of the shower drain (joint) along a straight line. With this design we will be able to make the holes in the shower drain fit more tightly with the peg. We also decided to shorten the horizontal tube and maybe the base. This will be based on Carl’s calculations. We are hoping these new design elements will eliminate any wobbliness seen in the lamp currently. Here’s Steve’s quick sketch of the revised joint along with some pictures of the joint:







Next, we talked about our general and long-term goals:
- Business creation in developing countries: to help distributing the lamp around the region more easily.
- Local partner: someone who will be in charge of the business
- Introduce motivation to build the lamp for locals
- Improve surgical lighting
- Develop a working product
- Hospital contact
- Train locals: train selected people (mechanics?) to build the lamp so that they can do it by themselves. Biannual check-ups.
- Help in redesign: stay in contact with the people and help them out with any issues they have with the design.

We also thought we should start out with one region at first and one group (~20 people) per region. We felt that meeting the trainees in person at least once was necessary to ensure quality of the lamp is up to our expectations.

Next we talked about Net Impact and Freeplay. We generally agreed working with Freeplay will benefit us and decided to contact Freeplay relatively soon to see if they were interested at all. In the meantime, we decided to concentrate on finishing up the current prototype and market analysis. We also decided that we may need a public health (for specs) and EECS person (for circuit design) to help us out with the project.

Here is our preliminary timeline for the rest of the semester:

October: Calculations
November: Market research, get specs (how bright, how long should the battery last, etc)
December: Have mechanical part of the prototype done, first contact with Freeplay, come up with preliminary circuit design to incorporate hand-cranked power source, etc.
January: CAD design of the lamp

What we've been up to for the past several months...

For new people coming to this blog, I'm sorry about the lack of updates. In the weeks following the last post we had to dedicate a large portion of our time to finishing the prototype in time to be shipped to Uganda and therefore didn't have much time to write in this blog.

Towards the end of April the lamp was sent to Mountains of the Moon University in Fort Portal, Uganda with our collaborator Abigail Mechtenberg. Unfortunately our prototype wasn't in good enough shape for clinical trials (the joint connecting the vertical and horizontal beams was too weak), but the students at the university there redesigned our lamp and built it with locally available parts for only $40, including a hand crank power system. They told us that our general concept was sound (except for that faulty joint) and that the lamp produced more than enough light.

Over the summer we redesigned the lamp to simplify it and to stabilize the joint. We're nearly done with our second generation prototype where our goal is to get all the functionality we want using hardware store parts. Next we'll be building another prototype using mostly bike and car parts.

We're also making some progress on the business side as well. Net Impact is a student group run out of the business school and they are running a case competition based on M-HEAL's surgical lamp.

Now that we're back into the semester, we should be posting more often.