Designs are starting to take shape!

This week, I've been transitioning into the building phase of my project. I'm building a calibration facility that we can use to calibrate the ECO Triplets in lab. Here are just a few of the things I have to consider in my design:

-The system cannot leak. Leaks lead to failures and failure of the chamber means no calibration. We also will be dealing with very small, precise (as precise as possible, at least) concentrations in solution, so losing dye, bead, or phytoplankton mass to leaks needs to be avoided.
-The system needs to be adaptable. Craig would like to be able to plumb in other WET Labs sensors in this calibration facility on down the road.
-The chamber itself should be large enough that the sensor's field of view is only catching water. The sensors send out light and recieve it as it bounces back off of particles in the water. If the wall of the chamber cuts through that field of view, our data won't be accurate. Also, the wall needs to be dark and non-reflective. Reflective walls can amplify the light signal within the chamber.
-The calibration facility needs to be built for a reasonable price, and we need to avoid over-engineering.

That last point deserves some further explanation. Here in the Applied Physics Laboratory, we have an incredible machine shop. There are engineers and machinists hired specifically to design and build devices like my calibration facility to accomodate all of the research the faculty is doing. They've designed some of the most elaborate, complicated equipment, and I'm assuming they could find a way to make literally almost anything. This creates an interesting dilemma: do I have the machine shop do the more complicated, puzzling parts of the design, or do I try and come up with something out of hardware store parts that requires no specialized machining? The machine shop is so enticing, but it is much more expensive than do-it-yourself work, and getting the work done may take weeks. In a sense, it also (for lack of a better word) robs me of some of my responsibility and ownership of the project.

Enter Alex. Craig introduced me to Alex, who is an engineer here in the AIRS Dept. Alex has been helping me with all of the machining I'm not trained to do, and he's been great to bounce ideas off of as to how we set this up with hardware store parts. As of today, I have all of the cuts lined out that still need to be done, and hopefully by the middle of next week, all of the cut pieces will be assembled. So exciting to see it coming into fruition!

Have a great weekend!