PoE Fall 2016 Section 2

Team Cascade was started as an optimistic bunch of friends, and that’s what we always aspired to be for the whole of our process. With a lot of confidence in each other and our engineering skills from the beginning, Team Cascade wanted to take every opportunity that PoE afforded to tackle a unique system. The team was inspired by a video of a display of a water curtain from an Osakan mall. In tackling this project, we were very aware of the fact that multiple teams in previous years had tried and failed to successfully implement similar projects, but we were attracted to, rather than intimidated by, this challenge. After all, it was the challenge and learning experience that we cared about, not the validity of the final system. Working with water would involve every member of the team learning new things about waterproofing and fluid dynamics. Using actuating solenoid valves to control the water’s flow would introduce electrical and software complexity. It seemed like the perfect project.

We set our Minimum Viable Product at 4 nozzles - just enough to produce basic patterns. We reached MVP in Sprint 3, but realized that the fluid dynamics involved with the flow through 4 nozzles was very different than that of 16. We refocused on our full system of 16 without perfecting the 4 nozzle system (adding housing, extending the height, adding the overflow pipe), but were rewarded in sprint 3 with the ability to turn on and off streams of water like we needed to.

In the end, we don’t know how the 16-nozzle system will be. We haven’t tried it yet.