It’s All About the Models (J Reed)

Hello again everybody! This is Jordan reporting from team Vertabend. As you have seen in Karrie and Zabdi’s posts we are currently in the midst of out prototyping phase. Personally I am both excited and nervous, because we finally get to do some real hands on stuff, but we have a tight schedule to keep. Anyways I’m going to talk mainly about the model today. As Karrie mentioned, we were working in Google SketchUp to attempt to model our pillow. That did not go very well. I have had experience with sketch up, and I love it… for some projects. If you want to model something large scale with mainly straight lines, then SketchUp is pretty much perfect, but we’re making a pillow so for our purposes it just doesn’t measure up to the task. Instead Karrie and I decided to use Auto Cad Inventor (with the help of a blog post by Erin S. from JetSet who found a free student version of Inventor) for our model. First we had to decide what our exact measurements would be (though of course these are subject to change later when we improve our prototype) since we were mostly just messing around in SketchUp with an idea of a pillow but no clear plan. Our pillow ended up being slightly smaller than a standard twin bed pillow, and we decided to make the prototype actual size. Once we got the measurements out of the way, we decided each of us was going to make a model then pick the better one, and we ended up choosing Karrie’s.

By now it’s been about three years since I’ve used Auto Cad so I was/am pretty rusty, but Karrie is remarkable and got the hang of it quickly. Needless to say she was much farther in her model than I was when we convened yesterday, so we decided to work together to finish up hers, and we now have a completed model! Also, we will be getting our materials likely after Thanksgiving break and we’ll be able to start working on our actual real life prototype! Karrie and I are a little worried about how we are going to attach all of the components together, but I guess we’ll find out soon. I’m getting so excited!