One of my CAD projects was modeling a hip stem implant. This one project turned into two different projects. Initial project was to make a 3D hip stem implant using creo and focus on design specification and just created a 3d model for my orthopedics course. And my second project was for ANSYS where I had to do finite element analysis on a model. This 3D model was imported into ansys which resulted in loss of features. It did not make it any easier because I had to change the part file of the stem implant multiple times and import the file over and over again for finite element analysis in ansys. So two separate projects and using the same part file was time consuming because I had to redo parts to decrease the stress concentrations for my meshing and fea.

I handled it by learning a lot more about my part file and the hip stem implant was good enough to further go through design modification and test it with different materials. I could of done a better job if I created another model in ANSYS to avoid multiple changes and spending extra hours on just importing over and over again even for minor changes in the design. Integrating two of these projects was not beneficial.

This points out that sometimes it may save you time while other times you may spend more time then needed. This could not have been predicted before hand and I only learned this conflict as I was working on the second project.

During one of my internships, I had one big project that I had to divide up into several smaller parts. Each individual component used a whole different set of tools and doing them all at the same time would only confuse me. So essentially, what I ended up doing was spending a lot of time on the critical part of the project and really focusing on that and making sure that was correct. Once I was confident in that, I moved on to the other mini-projects. Once finished, I had to combine all of the parts together. Unfortunately, I forgot to account for a specific issue and that really affected the integration. What I ended up doing after that was going back and restarting that component again and making sure it matched up which ended up wasting a lot of time and caused some delays. If I could go back, I would have done the whole thing differently. I would still break the project up into smaller components but instead of doing everything separately and then combining them at the end, I should have implemented 'checks' just to make sure that all the parts would line up at a certain point and then move forward and then check again, and so on and so forth.

When I interned in the summer, the department dealt with data processing and product testing. During my undergrad, I was exposed to BME 384 and Capstone where I was exposed to the things that I did in my internship. In BME 384, I dealt with designing experiments, technical terminology, data acquisition, data processing, and interpreting the information. All of which I did in my internship. This led me to have a fairly easy transition within the environment and also gave me the opportunity to skip learning the basics from the people but instead learn the advanced techniques that they integrate within their design and analysis. In my Capstone class, I dealt with project that was very Matlab-heavy and involved the use of Creo and 3D printers. This allowed me to be able to incorporate the things that I’ve learned in class into the projects that I was assigned to. Lastly, I was also exposed to document writing and management techniques in my other classes which allowed me to work efficiently during the time.

When I used to do projects for an electrical engineering company, the Project Manager of the company would let me create the electrical circuit diagrams based on the location, and needs of the people in the community where I was doing the project. Some features I would always use was transformers, and other electrical components using programs such as Pspice, Multisim, or sometimes AutoCad. However, when I started taking my capstone design class, I was responsible for designing the circuitry of my product. The fact that I had done this before helped me to get through it in an easier way and provide a better quality work.
Let me know what you think!
Sincerely,
Roberto Pineda.

In my undergraduate drug discovery research laboratory, I often experienced situations where integration of two (or more) projects was required. When synthesizing relatively large, pharmaceutically active compounds, they would be occasionally be made in pieces. Each segment of the final molecule had to be made with purity, concentration, and chemical properties in mind to successfully join them later in the synthesis process. In one situation, I was tasked with a six step synthesis and then combining my final product with two other scientists products to make the final active compound. In most cases before this step (including this scenario) we each combined our material on 1/10th scale in a ‘practice’ synthesis step to ensure that the reaction would run smoothly and we would not lose all out hard work if there was an unforeseen error. In this way, only a small amount of product was initially risked and then, when/if successful, the other 9/10ths was put though the same reaction mechanism. In this particular case, the reaction worked so there were no issues. However, if it failed, a different mechanism of combination was researched and the 3 ‘parts’ would have been joined a different way.

During summer internship, my main task was to reform out of a particular raw material. My internship consisted of several parts, which also incorporated a potential introduction to a new process change, if given enough time to complete the reform. During the conclusion of my internship, my second project i.e. the process change was a potential solution for my first project, thus I was able to incorporate both concepts in my project presentation.

Chris

For my project, the smart-cast, integration was the toughest challenge to overcome! Simply put, our project had several components from both a hardware and software perspective. It's very easy to get one sensor working to give an output signal on a serial monitor, but taking that sensor data and displaying whilst datalogging it whilst checking to see if it hit a threshold whilst taking other readings whilst writing raw data to another data file....you get the point. We were able to get every component working very early on in our project. The majority of our time spent on the project has been system design and integration. Whenever something did not integrate properly, we first did verification tests on the components separately, and if those passed, we checked bother the software and hardware side separately of both components working in tandem. 99% of the time, if two components didn't integrate properly, it was either the hardware wasn't set up right or the software wasn't written properly. Rarely has something not integrated based off of faulty components. Even still, though we have a working product, we are continually working on our device to optimize it and make the system design more stable. Integration is always a work in progress.

I could consider my one summer internship an integration of sorts. I was in charge of designing a website with Google Maps API, and eventually we would have to integrate it with external data coming in through another website. The biggest issue at the time was finding a programming language that would allow for both the processing of the external data and the functioning website. This turned out to be quite the challenge and in the end we got the individual parts to work but were unable to properly integrate them. When we had to present our project in the end, we had to basically fudge some data. I think if there was better management of time throughout the length of the project, it would have been finished in time.

For my capstone project, I haven't had to put the whole entire system together yet, but for two major parts we encountered a lot of problems while putting them together. The project consists of mainly a hardware part and a software part and within the hardware component we needed to integrate a camera with infrared to use the whole system for eye tracking. Although it doesn't sound much of a problem, but when considering infrared safety guidelines and location in terms of the camera to the subject's eyes and all, a lot of integration details came out to be problems. It delays the entire project timeline and dealing with them can be very hectic. Paying a lot of attention to the details in the planning process makes the integration a very smooth process.

For my senior project in my undergrad, I had to develop a Speech recognition MATLAB code. This involved taking several of samples of identifiable vowel sounds as a baseline. The issue was how to compare somebody's voice to the samples that were collected. My advisor then told me about a code that a colleague was working with a neural network algorithm . This is essentially used for machine learning and we could use it to teach the computer to to use a database of samples to compare to an input sound and accurately classify it. This algorithm actually integrated very well into my project, so I was lucky enough to find a separate project that was exactly what I needed for my own project.

I feel that often times projects, or at the very least what we learn from them can carry over. I was an intern at a biomedical manufacturer that produced intra-aortic balloons for counter-pulsation therapy. In my training I learned a great deal about the device and was able to carry my knowledge over to a course where we modeled physiological systems using simulink to add on to and grow my knowledge of how the system functioned, as well as, the physiological functions in addition to the products components.

I have not worked in any kind of integration of project. But currently in which I work there would be the integration of other one which would be conducted in few months. I am making all my efforts to separate both the projects. I am making a worksheet kind of thing where everything which I did for the first project will be saved. This would be helpful for the future projects. Keeping log of the events would be a better one too. This forum would help me in successful separation of it.

During my capstone project, we had several mini projects to accomplish in order to complete our final project. For example, our project was to create a device which measures three parameters, blood glucose, activity, and oxygen rate and transfers this data to a UI via web server. One of the team members worked on designing the back end software module to receive the data from the hardware and sort it accordingly. The other member worked on the front end software module to display the correct data to the end client. In the beginning of the second semester
(About 50% done), we realized the two languages did not communicate when we tried to put everything together. The root cause was that both of the programs were coded in different languages as it was easier for the programmer. As a result, we had to use a merger/converter program for the code to function properly. After successfully executing the code in the new language, we were successfully able to run the code to transmit the data properly.

At work, we have multiple projects going on simultaneously in R&D to enhance some of our product lines. One of the projects involved mixing in a different material to reduce the overall weight of the implant. Another project involved aimed at making the implant more smooth by altering the implant geometry slightly. It turns out making that slight geometric modification reduced the overall weight of the implant. So now we're looking into combining both projects and making prototypes then testing the feasibility. I can't go into too much details because it's proprietary information, but hopefully the general description I gave makes sense!