Reflection (14.11.2014)

Today we presented the final presentation of our technology project-Brake Cooling System in the class. We described every important process of our project in detail and showed the video of our project to the classmates and lecturers. Unfortunately, we made a major mistake in our presentation. We forgot to describe that what is our project and the purpose of our project. Because this is the first time some lecturers had taken our presentation, they did not know what our project is. Thus some lecturers still were confused about our project after the presentation done. This is our major mistake, which will remind us to prevent same mistake from happening again in the future presentation.

Since we determined our technology project, we almost spent one semester time on this project. In this process, I learnt some new knowledge and skills from this project.

Our project can be divided into two parts, the electronic and mechanical. Jin and I are responsible for the mechanical part of the project. In the beginning, I thought that find the suitable components for our project will be very easy, but in fact it was not easy. Before we looked for our components, we already measured and got the approximate dimensions for those components we need. After we got those components and tried to install on that existing project, we found that these components are not very consistent with our requirements. The problem was that we did not consider thoughtfully for the whole project. When we considered about some components dimensions, we did not take into account for another components dimension. So it causes components cannot be installed in the right position, and components are stuck. From this experience of doing technology project, I know that we must carefully consider all aspects of the project and carefully measure the components dimensions before we look for our components. This will reduce trouble and save time for us. I also learnt how to manage the time and money and how to process a project. This will be very helpful for me in the future.

In our project, we also used some knowledge and skills we’ve learned before, from the Brake class and Electrical and Electronic class. In our project, we must consider the temperature of brake failure or brake fade. We found the brake failure temperature by searching some books and internet. Then we should allow our project to spray water mist throughout the ventilated rotor to cool the brake rotor temperature down before it reached the warning temperature. By using some knowledge we learnt before, we use the formula to calculate the amount of water the nozzle need to spray, this allowed us to choose right tank. We generally responsible for mechanical, but we also participated in the electronic section. We need to connect a lot of electronic components in the circuit board, such as transistor, temperature sensor, LED and so on. These we learnt from Electronic and Electrical class.

For the personal limitations, I think I am good at on the time management. Our project has been successfully completed one week before final presentation start. But in the progress of the project, I also exposed many personal limitations. We only can apply some simple formula to calculate the data, it will cause some error. The project will be not very perfect. To edit program cost us a lot of time, because we do not very good at programming. We also do not well at electronic. We wasted about 80 dollars in some useless components, because we do not plan our project well.

To do this project gave us many experiences, we consolidate the knowledge we learnt before and we also learned new knowledge and capabilities, and apply them to our project. In the future, I need to learn more knowledge about electronic, which will be very benefit for my next year course.

In the end, I am very grateful to Roman and Simon to give us help.