Boston Device Blog

Prototyping Using Sourced Parts | MIT Workshop

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

Recently, we ran a workshop at MIT for mechanical engineering undergraduate students in the class, 2.009 Product Engineering Process.  This is a capstone engineering course where teams of 15-20 students design and prototype a functional product within the timeframe of a single semester.  Since this is a significant challenge in a rapid time-frame, one of the important learnings is to leverage sourced (or off-the-shelf) parts when building early prototypes.

For this workshop we tasked the students to build a functional coffee maker using only sourced parts.  These parts could come from Mcmaster, Amazon, Grainger or any other online supplier of hardware that ships in less than 2-days.  The students had one 3-hr session to design and source parts, and a second 3-hr session to build the functional coffee makers.  A tall challenge to say the least!   

Following are some pictures from the workshop.

The students started off by brainstorming their coffee makers on paper.  As if building a functional coffee maker isn't enough, we asked the students to personalize their makers or make them fun in some way.  Most of the teams finished the brainstorming task in about 20 minutes.  

After the brainstorming, the students hopped on laptops and searched for parts that matched their ideas.  The classic McMaster catalogs also came in handy for this sourcing exercise.  All of the teams build BOMS (Bill-of-Materials) with suppliers, part numbers and descriptions of the parts to be used in their prototypes.  The BOMs were collected, and used for ordering all of the supplies.

Next session, the boxes arrived, and the teams immediately jumped into buildling.  Holes were drilled and lengths of parts were cut, but no other fabrication was allowed.  The teams encountered unexpected sizes of pipe diameters, sealing challenges, and heat dissipation challenges to name a few.