3.082 Bulletin Board – Fall 2002

Tue 3 Dec 02

• The dry run this Thursday (1pm, 2-131) should give us a preliminary look at what you’ll be presenting the following Tuesday. It’ll be very condensed and informal, since you’ll only have 10 minutes for the dry run versus 30 minutes for the final. Multiple presenters are OK for the final, but in the interest of time the dry run should probably only have one.
• Our final oral/slide presentations (30 min each, multiple presenters OK), along with your display-case poster and hardware exhibit, will given Tue. 12/10 in the Chipman Room (8-314). The room should be available for setup at 2, with the presentations beginning at 2:20 or so. Past teams have used PowerPoint to prepare their poster, then used ftp or zip-disk the file to Kinko’s in Harvard Square for printing and mounting. Plan on giving Kinko’s several days to do this. We’ll pay for it. Make the poster size 24” wide by 30” high – keep to these dimensions!
• Lab work should end at 5pm on Thursday. Of course, every team would like to have more time for experimentation. But it would have to end eventually anyway, and we have found that you really need the last days to finalize your thoughts and writeups. We won’t be hard-line about granting very limited extensions, but try finish up by the end of lab Thursday if at all possible.

• Plan on cleaning up the materials or apparatus you have lying around the labs; we’re considering giving Incompletes to teams abusing this request. You can delete unnecessary graphics and other files from your Athena lockers, but leave your web pages in place. Same for the 8-003 computers: remove unnecessary files, but leave the principal ones.

Sat 5 Oct 02

• Next Thursday you’ll be presenting your final (pretty final, anyway) design reviews, and all four teams will present – that will limit us to 15 minutes per team. You’ll probably have enough time only to show your SolidWorks drawing of your device and talk us through some of the calculations used in developing ii.
• Your design web page will have more detail: stress and heat transfer calculations as appropriate, Ashby plots and other materials-selection tools, etc. Your background web page will have technical theory drawn from texts, research literature, etc.
• This is the culmination of the heavy-theory part of your project, with actual processing experimentation and optimization moving to center stage for the rest of the term. We’ll be assigning midterm grades based on this design stage, and these grades will be perhaps a fourth of your final grade. Our technical expectations are high – you’re advanced MSE students with a LOT of lecture material under your belts, and your design work should show it.

Thu 26 Sep 02

• I’ve cleaned up the team folders on Dmse8003a a bit, moving old projects to a different folder (and, I hope, not glitching the files you’ve already put there). I’ve made new subfolders in the team1 – team4 folders named “presentations,” where I’d like you to put your PowerPoint presentations, named according to the date of the presentation. I put today’s team1 and team2 presentations in there, but from now on you can do that yourself. See the 9/2/02 entry for some comments on how to do this.
• I’d also like you to keep a current copy of your MSProject Gantt chart file in your presentation folder; this will make it easier for the instructors to examine them and make comments.

Wed 25 Sep 02

• Tomorrow we’ll have 15-20 minute presentations from teams 1 and 2 at 1pm in 2-131. Use visuals as appropriate. We might also have some less formal discussion on the team 3 and team 4 projects, so be prepared for that as well.
• Take a look at team 4’s (CarBrake) notebook page; this is a good example of what we’re after. I’d prefer not to have to click on a link to see an entry – just write them in, most recent entry on top, as team 4 has done. As you become more comfortable with the technical details of your project and have performed more calculations, these notebook pages should become more technical and quantitative. You still want the diary-type descriptions, but go beyond that: equations, scanned-in sketches, graphs from instruments, etc.

Fri 20 Sep 02

• Recall that I want you to leave the index.html files I originally set up unchanged; my apologies to those annoyed by my plain-vanilla look. The files you create have to have the same names pointed to by the links in the index, so for instance putting them in a separate directory won’t work. (Of course, if you want to set up subdirectories to keep things organized you can make appropriate links in the main team directory.) I’m very pleased you’re moving out on these pages, and in short order we’ll get everything running smoothly.
• More apologies: I tried to move some files around to get things back to what I had in mind, and in doing so I’ve probably messed up some of your files and the read/write permissions. Give them a look, and let me know what I’ve broken.

Thu 19 Sep 02

• You can bring your presentations to 2-131 on your own laptops if that’s convenient; usually the connection to the projector works without glitch (not always, though). Alternatively, you can email your file to me (by noon of the presentation day) and I’ll put it on my laptop. You should think in advance about what to do if everything goes wrong, though: you might have hardcopies of your slides, and you can always do a chalk-and-blackboard presentation.
• You’ll soon be ordering equipment and materials. You can have Toby do this using his MIT Visa charge card, or have my assistant (Tim Doyle, room 12-009, phone 3-6819, email tbdoyle) fill out a purchase order. In the case of chemicals, you need to have the MSDS and associated safety procedures (storage requirements, cleanup, disposal, etc.) in your notebook before we’ll approve the order.

Wed 18 Sep 02

• I’ve set up the Athena lockers for your web pages; these are named /afs/athena.mit.edu/course/3/3.082/www/team1_f02 (or team2_s02, etc.) Keep an eye on the quota and don’t store unused graphics in the locker; these use up a lot of disk space. The index page itself should not be changed; you’ll be creating the pages to which the index links point.
• Put a statement of your project objectives, as you see them now, in the summary.html file; you’ll probably modify this from time to time during the term.
• The notebook.html page should start filling up beginning this coming Thursday; work on keeping it up to date.

Thu 12 Sep 02

• I’ve put a file, MHD2.ppt on the web; this is my example of the three-slide presentations you’ll be doing next week (Sep. 19).

Wed 11 Sep 02

• The class will meet in 2-131 tomorrow at 1pm; there will be some organizational information, and each group will describe briefly their preliminary project plans.
• Here’s the organization of groups and subgroups as I have it now.

Bashaw (a) Xie (b) Parse (c) Roylance (d)

Team1 Dai Wong McIlroy Huang

Tennis racket strings?

Team2 --- Liu Banful Rodriquez

Organic photovoltaics?

Team3 Rajter Tweedie Ybarra Reinharth

Ceramic shoe spikes?

Team4 Jenkins Ham Donohue Kim

Composite brake disks?

Thu 5 Sep 02

• Two good general references for materials engineering design have been put on library reserve (room 14N-132): W.D Callister, Materials Science and Engineering, An Introduction, 5th ed.; and C.J. McMahon and C.D. Graham, Introduction to Engineering Materials: The Bicycle and the Walkman.
• The computers in 8-003 are named Dmse8003b, Dmse8003a, and Dmse8003c from left to right as you look at them from the middle of the room. Dmse8003c is reserved for the 3D printer, and the other two are available for student use. The software on them includes SolidWorks (a CAD package), Ansys (a finite element code), CES (the Cambridge Engineering Selector for materials selection), DreamWeaver (a webpage makeup package), Microsoft Project (for Gantt charts and other project management tools), and MathEdit (for putting equations in Word documents).
• Dmse8003a and Dmse8003b have folders named Team Folders, inside which are subfolders named Team1, Team2, Team3 and Team4. I’d like you to put a copy of your weekly PowerPoint presentations in your team folder on Dmse8003a, and also a current version of your Project Gantt chart.
• The computers in 8-003 permit “anonymous ftp” file transfers; this makes it easier to move files to those machines from other locations, such as your personal computer. You ftp to dmse8003a.mit.edu for instance; call or email me for the username and password. This will put your files in a directory named “FTP IN” from which Joe or I can move them to your team locker.

• Putting math on the web is problematic, and no methods are perfect. I’ve leaned toward using LaTeX to make .ps files that I convert to .pdf with Acrobat distiller (as in my Mechanics Modules). Another approach, not as pleasing visually but simpler, is to use Word with the extended MathType editor to make a web document that can be uploaded to your locker. Look at this example to see how this comes out.