Ben Burmeister: ME 250 Final Thoughts

I had a lot of fun this semester especially in this class.  This design class helped me know that Mechanical Engineering was the right choice of field for me.  I really enjoyed the guest speaker that came in and gave the talk about working in a group.  In was interesting to see how I fit into a design group.  It was very satisfying to be given a challenge and goal that we were able to overcome using our engineering.  The most important thing that I learned was to use Solid Works.  Now that I know how to use that software I can do a lot more.  I really enjoyed the lecture on 3D printing I find that very interesting.  It was very helpful to learn how to do a step-by-step manufacturing plan to help use be efficient with our time in the shop.  Something that I have never had to do was analyzing a machine to find out what are the important things that you should know about it.  Doing the design review was our first time that we needed to analyze our machine.  I look forward to taking the next design class in the fall.

This was the first team project that I have been a part of.  I was a little nervous about who I would be working with since none of my friends are in ME thankfully I got to work with a great group of guys.  It was sometime challenging to find a time that we all could meet to talk about the design.  There were a couple Saturday mornings that we had to sacrifice to stay a head of the competition.  Right from the beginning of the semester my goal was to be done with the manufacturing of the car a week early this meant that my team had to extra productive.  This was hard to do because we were all taking a full semester of classes and other activities.  We did make out goal of being done a week early this gave us time to work out the troubles in our robot.  We were also able to give it a nice paint job because we were done early.  From the very beginning we were told that time in the shop was limited and that the dead line come up quickly.  Time management is very important it.

The ball tower challenge was very fun to participate in.  For about three weeks I was putting in a huge amount of my time building our bot and it was very fun to be able to show it off to people at the design expo.  I wanted to come in one of the ranked positions because I felt like our bot was very well designed.  Even though we didn’t come in first, coming in third seemed to feel just as good.  I was extremely pleased with how our bot performed. 

This semester as shown me how much I like designing and building robots.  In the fall I plan on trying to join the MAAV Michigan Autonomous Aerial Vehicles.