Project Description
The reverse engineering project was the first project I underwent in my senior engineering course. Our mission was to pick an item to disassemble, practice creating conceptual sketches of the item, and research as much as possible about it in order to describe it to anyone. My team viewed the project as a way to put skills we learned into practice. The question we attempted to solve was "What are the individual components of this object and how do they each function as well as work together to produce the product?" We went about doing this by bringing in items to take apart and sketch, ultimately picking one to go further in depth on. We ended up picking my object, which was an old calculator made by Texas Instruments. Then, we proceeded to research everything about our object, ranging from the use of the plastic cover to the way a calculator produces a number answer. Next, we built a presentation to display our findings and a report to describe our findings more heavily. This project provided us with a lot of new information but also new skills. The steps we took in order to come to our final product are very useful for world application, especially in an engineering environment. We broke down the analysis into four categories: functional, material, structural, and manufacturing. The main features of our calculator include a battery made of lithium that gives power to the entire device, and a circuit board that transfers signals to the LCD screen that eventually portrays the calculated solution in the form of many, many pixels.
reverse_engineering_report.pdf | |
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reverse_engineering.pdf | |
File Size: | 1870 kb |
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Concepts
Reverse Engineering - method used to analyze an existing product to see how it is made, and possibly how to re-make or improve it.
Invention - design work that creates something new.
Innovation - improving an existing product or idea.
Take apart - disassembly of a product/item for the process of reverse engineering.
Functional Analysis - analysis that deals with function of different parts, how they work together, and the scientific principles that are related to these parts/how they function.
Materials Analysis - analysis that answers what materials were used and why they were used.
Structural Analysis - analysis that deals with how the parts are supported and connected together, and the purpose of each part.
Manufacturing Analysis - analysis that determines how the product was made, how raw materials were made into the finished product.
Invention - design work that creates something new.
Innovation - improving an existing product or idea.
Take apart - disassembly of a product/item for the process of reverse engineering.
Functional Analysis - analysis that deals with function of different parts, how they work together, and the scientific principles that are related to these parts/how they function.
Materials Analysis - analysis that answers what materials were used and why they were used.
Structural Analysis - analysis that deals with how the parts are supported and connected together, and the purpose of each part.
Manufacturing Analysis - analysis that determines how the product was made, how raw materials were made into the finished product.
Reflection
Throughout the reverse engineering project, I learned many important skills that can help me later in life. These are things I knew how to do before, but through practice I learned how to make these skills more efficient and effective. First, I finally learned how to research effectively. My group had to learn everything possible about our item, so we could explain how it works and each components function to someone that had no experience before with it. By researching, we learned the grit of our object, which is the scientific definitions and analysis that occurs in our item. I researched things that did not even make sense because I was trying to find additional random data on our item. Pretty much anything a person could think of about something is on the internet, and one just has to sift through the web to find the quality data. Second, I practiced and advanced the skill of conceptual sketching. Art has never been one of my strong suits, and I absolutely despised drawing diagrams or pictures to represent something. However, by doing this project I understand how important those sketches are in understanding a complex thing. They give the reader needed information that could not make sense to them through reading. For example, my initial sketches just included a picture of the calculator and its parts. Yet, I added measurements, notes, and ideas to the initial sketch to make it more comprehensible and clear. Then, I was able to describe to my team the separate parts, what they are connected to, and how it all works and looks. Prior to doing research, this was the best way to convince my team that this calculator was worth reverse engineering.
In addition to those project peaks, I still need to improve on a few things. First, I struggled with providing pictures in our presentation to better describe it. These pictures are crucial to the understanding of the viewer, and they provide valuable visuals that keep a viewer engrossed and focused. Leaving these in the dust and just doing text and sketches was a blunder of our presentation, and in the future I will remember to add as many pictures as I see fit. Also, I could've done more research on the specific manufacturer of the TI-30XIIS calculator. Initially, I thought that the calculator was too old to have an online credible manufacturer. However, the manufacturer was Texas Instruments, and we could have contacted them and obtained more data. If I was to contact them, it would provide quality information that would be useful to understanding their point of view from a marketing perspective. Also, I wish I had decided how to redesign the product to enhance its skills because that would have been a great closer to our presentation and could actually be worth possibly looking into. Overall, this project was a blast that aided me in practicing skills that will help me in the future.
In addition to those project peaks, I still need to improve on a few things. First, I struggled with providing pictures in our presentation to better describe it. These pictures are crucial to the understanding of the viewer, and they provide valuable visuals that keep a viewer engrossed and focused. Leaving these in the dust and just doing text and sketches was a blunder of our presentation, and in the future I will remember to add as many pictures as I see fit. Also, I could've done more research on the specific manufacturer of the TI-30XIIS calculator. Initially, I thought that the calculator was too old to have an online credible manufacturer. However, the manufacturer was Texas Instruments, and we could have contacted them and obtained more data. If I was to contact them, it would provide quality information that would be useful to understanding their point of view from a marketing perspective. Also, I wish I had decided how to redesign the product to enhance its skills because that would have been a great closer to our presentation and could actually be worth possibly looking into. Overall, this project was a blast that aided me in practicing skills that will help me in the future.