Monday, July 13, 2015

LS3 Bryan

  • Chapter 9: The chapter starts with an example of stuffing envelopes in large vs. small batches.  For what reasons does Ries say the small batches are more efficient?

Ries says it is more efficient because if you were to do 100 at a time, you would first have to sort everything and then start the process, but if you were to do that the 1 batch at a time group would already be done.

  • Chapter 9: "Hardware becoming software", "Fast production changes", and "Rapid prototyping tools" are all things that could help us build a robot more quickly.  Give an example of each of these 3 that we could do.

For Hardware becoming software we could simply use some of the many unused buttons on our joystick to do simple tasks for the robot. For example, we could use it to do a quick 180 turn or if we are in a position that we are in a lot of the time we could just press a button so then we could just finish the task without having to keep doing the same thing. For fast production changes we could have some people quickly do cad models and prototyping to find flaws in the designs by using the materials that are sitting in the robotics room and also have people ready for fall back ideas in case the specific design is too flawed. For rapid prototyping tools we could make use of the scrap metal and wood we already have instead of having to make a cad model and send it to Mcneilus steel. I don't know if we did that all of the time, but we could simply just use the scrap metal and wood that is just sitting there.

  • Chapter 10: We also lose people (students, mentors, parents, and sponsors).  What things cause this to happen?  Which of these can we control?

Some things that cause people to leave are moving, graduating, and simply just not wanting to be on the team. Well some things that cause these things to happen are fairly simple reasons like getting a new job, or doing well in school, or just not liking the people on the team or not liking the sport. We can control the graduating not wanting to be on the team by not letting people graduate. No just kidding, but we could have the graduates able to mentor our team the next year after they graduate. We could also be very welcoming to new people and show them things on our team.

  • Chapter 11: Explain the purpose of the "Five Whys" technique for root cause analysis.

The purpose of the "Five Whys" is to find the initial cause for something. To perform it you must ask yourself "Why" five times..

  • Overall: Let's say our build team's customer is the drive team.  Our design process usually involves creating and perfecting the robot as much as possible before giving the customer a couple days to use our product (and virtually no time to suggest changes after use).  What could we do to get our customer some kind of product sooner?  How could we learn from our customer and use their feedback in the design?

We could simply let them use a robot that is nothing close to the final design and have them suggest things about how we should fix it. We could ask them what they think of it and what they want on the robot and do what they want.

Summary:

I have learned that we must question ourselves to learn. We must also get other opinions from other people. We also don't have to do the same ideas as other teams. For example, many teams don't make hardware software, we could do that. We also don't have to rack our brains for complex solutions when we can just fix something with the easiest. "The best solution from a problem is usually the easiest one" -Glados.

3 comments:

  1. I like the idea of preventing people from graduating. Once you join robotics, you're in it for life. But on a more serious note, I agreed with a lot of your ideas regarding how to quickly produce and create different designs for our bot.

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  2. I think having out drive team use a poorly made design and tweaking from there to their preferences would be a great idea. I think that would be able to get us a much better robot in the end of the season.

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  3. I agree using the buttons that are not used to use them for simple task would probably help. Like that could help you change from being at a right angle to going to a 45 degree angle.

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