Meeting, September 2nd, 2015

Meeting of our class was held at the Spartan Superway Project's warehouse located at 128 St. John street, downtown San Jose. The meeting began with introduction of the mentors, then transitioned to the introduction of the new members (students) of the team. The students' introduction consisted of their findings from the previous students' reports, what stood out to them, what has been done, what sparked their interests, and what they hope to bring the project. During the presentations, the announcement for the upcoming event has been made for September 19th, where we will be presenting our model. However due to work, I will not be attending the event, but will be helping out in advance, with the prep work.

After the presentations,  we have taken a brief tour around the workshop, and familiarized ourselves with the projects from the previous years. Upon the completion of the tour, the students broke into smaller groups to work on what they sought fit. I have gone to the Full Scale group, which concentrates on designing the full scale lane switching mechanisms, suspension, and how the actual tracks could look like. The subgroup of Active Suspension Group has sparked my interest the most, so I have joined Matt, Dale, and Scott, to take on the project. Another subgroup that I would be interested is designing the interior of the bogie, specifically how it could be easily accessed by the disabled people and their wheelchairs.

The previous year's suspension design and the concept had a critical flaw, as well as deemed not sophisticated enough to be implemented in our project, so we realized we needed to come up with a completely new design, this year. The full scale model's suspension was a direct connection, just to show the perspective of how to bogie could look like, suspended from the track system. Unlike most of the other groups, we do not have any previous ideas and designs to work off of, which makes our part, way more exciting. During our 4 man sub group, there weren't much brainstorming ideas, however, it was a critical bonding moment, in which we all introduced ourselves, and shared our interests and hobbies, which lead us to this point. Our next class would be surely more productive. I am so excited to take on this journey!