Drill Hole Diagram

Hey guys,

Here is a diagram of the drill holes we have so far in the vertical and horizontal axes. I'll update it as we continue to drill.

Phil

Estimated Battery Life

- Elliot

Lamp Update 11/15

Hey guys,
Here's a summary of tonight's meeting and assignments between now and next week (sorry about the length, pay special attention to the "Assignments" section, it may include things I didn't mention tonight at the meeting).

Tonight Selvan came to his first M-HEAL lamp meeting and he met the team. After introducing him to everyone the engineers left for the Wilson center. Steve, Mustafa, and Naroo brought Selvan up to speed on what we've done for the lamp and what our general goals are. They then discussed the main points that need to be made when approaching Freeplay and similar organizations (demonstrated need via Selvan's experience in Uganda, $40 proven pricepoint from Abigail, advantages of a surgical light over general lighting solutions (lower power consumption due to more focused light, frees up manpower, stability)).
Selvan told us we might be able to field test the lamp in Kumi, Uganda from which he recently returned. One of the problems for the hospital in Kumi is that the generator generates more electricity than is needed and therefore wastes fuel. Due to fuel prices the generator is underutilized and the hospital is frequently without power. The hospital has 350 beds but averages 500 patients at any given time (and up to 750 during malaria season).

Carl, Phil, Mike, and Ling went to the Wilson center and worked on the base. We now have a cage in the Wilson center to put our stuff in. Currently there is still some SF3L stuff in there that allegedly will be removed. Until it is gone please tag anything you put in there with a piece of tape with "M-HEAL" written on it, so it doesn't get thrown away.

Next week the engineers will meet at the Wilson center at 7:30 and the MBAs plus Mustafa will meet at 8:15 in the LBME project room.

Assignments:
Mustafa: Work on NCIIA grant; send me a summary of things we need for the NCIIA grant
Naroo: Work on penta-chart and blurb for clearlyso.com and lightingafrica.com; find out if a MAP project is going to Uganda and contact info for that group
Selvan: Work on penta-chart and blurb for clearlyso.com and lightingafrica.com; contact people in Kumi about testing there
Anita: Talk to Mustafa to see how you can help him on the NCIIA grant

Carl: Continue working on stability calculations with the assistance of Ling ; go to the hardware store with Mike
Ling: Work on stability calculations with Carl
Mike: Write down a drill list for everything except for the up-and-down joint (including the rotation). You'll probably need some sketches and you might have to drop by the Wilson center sometime this week to check what's done (unless you remember it all); go to the hardware store with Carl
Phil: Write down a drill list for the up-and-down joint . Include a sketch to show where the holes are. You might have to drop by the Wilson center sometime this week to check what's done (unless you remember it all). The current sketch you have up looks pretty good except you forgot the "noodle" to change the direction of the cable as it enters the tube.

Elliot: Start preliminary electrical calculations. Look in the lockers in the project room for the packaging for the flashlights we're using. The packaging should tell you the voltage and power consumption. Figure out how long our lamp head should last when connected to a typical motorcycle battery and a typical car battery. Look up general info on handcrank generators and estimate the relationship between crank time and light time.

Please post the results of your assignments to the blog.

If you have any questions or run into any problems, don't hesitate to email me, I'm here to help you.

Steve

Peg Design Sketches

Here is the peg design we came up with at last week's meeting. This drawing doesn't really show how the steel cable connects to the peg, or how the spring connects to the stopper and beam. There are still a few open options for these things.

Phil

Tonight we had a really productive meeting. Here's a summary:

Design Changes:
Main Joint - We fleshed out the idea from last week and are now planning to remove the hinge and instead move the pin in and out directly perpendicular to the hole. We'll try to get as much of the mechanism inside the horizontal pole as possible. We'll be using primarily parts we already have. Phil will post some sketches of the design soon; please look it over and make sure that it matches your mental picture of how things work.

Base - We'll be getting new steel L-brackets to keep the vertical pole steady and we'll replace the brackets underneath the junction with a square plate. This allows the vertical pole to rest on a flat surface instead of on bolt heads. It also simplifies the connections since the square plate can be connected using the same holes as the L-brackets.

Rotation at the Main Joint - We'll follow through with the suggestion that Mike made a bit ago and use a slotted tube on top and a tube on bottom.

Arm Length - We decided to shorten the lamp arm length to 3 ft to make it less ungainly. This will allow us to shorten the counterweight arm considerably.

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I talked to the MBA students who won the Net Impact case competition. They are planning to work with us and are at least some of them are coming to next week's meeting.

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Assignments:
Carl: Eqns for the counterweight and base
Phil: Draw up the base and main joint changes from today's meeting and post it on the blog
Elliot and Mike: Buy parts before Sunday
Ling: Weigh the lamp head
Steve: Write meeting summary, get us 24 hr access to Wilson, find out where our shelves are at Wilson

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Shopping List:
Steel L-brackets, 4"x4"
Square Piece, 8"x8", 1/8"-1/4" thick (check Wilson scrap first)
Various Bolts, 3/4"-1.5"
Eyelets for keeping the noodle in place?
Ferrule

Steve

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.