Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams

Greetings from the Oviedo Inventeam!

It’s now well into the new year, and we have had a lot going on. Subdivisions of the project are now meshing together and we are quickly finishing up loose ends.

Our major event this month was going to the SolidWorks International Convention 2009. SolidWorks is a compilation of engineering software, which we use to create schematics and blueprints for parts of our project. Hosted at the Swan and Dolphin at Disney in Orlando, Florida, (a 30 minute drive) we were invited to come attend as guests to the convention, and we were also graciously given a booth of our own for the main convention! At the convention, we were VIP’s for the day, with front row seats to the keynote session featuring the President and CEO of SolidWorks, and the hosts of the Discovery Channel show “Prototype This.” Our picture, as well as our project was shown during the keynote to a room of over 4,000 engineers and scientists. We later were able to meet the President of SolidWorks, as well as very knowledgeable and helpful people, willing to provide any kind of support we may need. We spent the rest of our day going through companies’ booths, looking at some of the cutting edge technology the electronics world has to offer, including a 3D mouse, new graphics cards, and different projects and examples designed in SolidWorks. We had a great time, learned tons, and had even more fun seeing real-world applications to what we learn in school.

As for the team, our project is underway, and we are making great progress. Here are the updates on our various groups:

Research and Development: The tent frame has been designed and construction will begin within the next two weeks. One of our parents is letting us build the prototype for a tangello tree in their yard. Testing of the polyethylene films has been completed. Final data analysis is under way. The R&D team will present these results and announce their decision on which film to use at the team’s March 10th meeting. The heating circuit has been designed and is currently being tested in the lab, with time and temperature tests. We recently met with one of our mentors, a professional farmer, to discuss layouts and designs best suited for orange trees, and have begun to implement his criticism into our designs for large-scale commercial installation in citrus groves. He offered us a lot of insight on problems that would arise in various designs, as well as informed us about the history of how the citrus industry has fought against freezing. We plan to have a complete working prototype installed on the tree by the end of March.

Finance: Our finance is well on track, sticking to our budget and editing it quickly whenever we have a difference of money. Our June trip to MIT is rapidly approaching, and we have begun fundraising for our additional expenses (Airplane tickets and Housing) by sending out letters addressed to local communities, clubs, and businesses informing them about our project.

Marketing : We finished designing and printing our flyers for our invention, and were able to hand them out at the convention. You can view the flyer here. Our general presentation (including a PowerPoint and various speeches) continues to be revamped, adding more and more facts and information as we research further into our topic.    We have been meeting with a mentor to discuss slide layout, and presentation styles to maximize our effectiveness during presentations that we will be making to middle schools, and different groups.

Technical:   Our website has been revamped, and is now live at www.oviedoinventeam.org . The website includes information on the ThermaTent, photos, and our latest news regarding the Oviedo InvenTeam.

Overall, we have been moving ahead, overcoming any problems we’ve had, and June will be here before we know it.

Hello from the Garfield-Palouse High School InvenTeam!  We are working hard to make up for lost time due to winter weather in December.  As of right now, our electrical team is building parts, our mechanical team is ordering parts and finalizing important calculations, and our marketing team is getting ready for fundraisers coming up in March, as well as purchasing plane tickets.

We are starting the patent process for our project.  We’re working with a law firm that deals with patents, and are in the research stage currently.  We hope to have our patent application started soon and finished quickly in order to get the benefits of the provisional patent.  We are also looking into the possibility of and working on other applications of our project.  We have been approached by a man whose son works for a mining company.  After hearing about our project, they are hoping to use it to open up new employment opportunities, as well as use for disaster response.

 Stay tuned for more updates about the Garfield-Palouse High School InvenTeam!

Latest developments for the Rockport High School InvenTeam:

We have established new business relationships with Kaiser Systems (Beverly, Massachusetts), a designer/manufacturer of power supplies and storage devices, as well as Autoliv (Stockholm, Sweden), a maker of auto safety systems such as airbags.

You may rightly deduce by these new partnerships that we are considering a PADS (pneumatic auto-deployment system) that utilizes electronics in place of the mechanical system of the original design. After initial discussions with Kaiser, they assure us that a low voltage, long-term storage, weatherproof power source can be devised to trigger an auto air-bag type of initiator. That answered many (but not all) of our concerns with an electronic solution.

Autoliv, for their part, can supply custom-programmed tilt sensors, as well as staged initiators and small tanks capable of a much greater PSI than the tanks we’ve used thus far. The main concern for us at this point is the final unit cost of this much higher-tech PADS. No longer an off-the-shelf component made device, we need to be wary that our new direction does not lead to a prohibitively expensive solution. This point has been (and will continue to be) made to both Kaiser and Autoliv as we procede.

The students, especially the original 2008 InvenTeam members (who even this year are still only sophomores and juniors), were somewhat reluctant to move away from “their” original PADS. I quite understand (and to some extent share) the sentimental issues involved, but have tried to incorporate the lesson of moving on in the interest of the greater good of the project. In the face of industry non-disclosure forms, and corporate visits, I think they were starting to feel like the project was slipping away from them. In response, I’ve made a solemn vow to them that they are and will remain the PADS project, and will be up to their elbows in it all the way to the end.

Stay tuned for further developments.