Day 6: Reverse Engineering
Over the weekend, I began working on my reverse engineering project. I have used Cad before but have only used it in Inventor. I became very frustrated during the first hour or two of attempting to get the hang of Solidworks even after watching countless tutorials. I then began to question when we had to do a reverse engineering project in the first place. I went from thinking that this was an unnecessary assignment to thinking about several designs that are only possible by reverse engineering. Immediately I thought about a project we did in our systems class this past semester. We came up with a system schematic for the nucleus accumbens with or without the presence of cocaine in the body. We had to look at the process in depth and decide how many subsystems there were and the interactions between them all. Eventually we found that equations for these subsystems were not readily available so we had to reverse engineer the equations by using graphs in different literature sources. This helped to remind me that we are not always given products in their final functioning form or, if we are given that, we might not be given the process to get from the beginning stages to the final product. We knew the input and output of the nucleus accumbens system and had to come up with the intermediate subsystems. Similarly, we were able to see a functioning syringe but were not able to duplicate it and assemble it ourselves without reconstructing each of its parts in Cad and reassembling it. I’ve learned that it’s much easier to do an assignment once you understand the purpose of why it is important.
-Jordan
BME Design 