First of all, today was Lara’s birthday so it was gonna be a good day anyway!!!
What a busy day! The team actually split up to do some different things in order to be more efficient.
Since we checked the components required for the PCBs last night and noticed that we were missing some of them, Sorina and JB went to the electronics market in Huaqiangbei this morning to bargain to get the missing components. I heard that they were pretty successful so that’s a good thing! Lara, Link and Alexis stayed at the hotel to worked this morning and I went with the other HEC students to a “field trip” in order to observe the Chinese market for our respective projects. So we went to a mall and we walked around in order to try to find similar objects to ours. We also tried to talk to some people but unfortunately most of the people there don’t speak English so you can imagine the difficulty to communicate. I was impressed to learn that most of the people in Shenzhen (I don’t know hoe it works in the rest of China) don’t have a mailbox. If they want one, they need to rent it or if they don’t want this option, they get a call from the post office when they get a letter and they need to go there to pick it up. Pretty complicated right! So I think that once we’re well established in Europe, China is definitely going to be our target market!
Let me just show you a picture of the menu of the restaurant where we ate today. As you can imagine, we didn’t understand anything, so we picked something random and luckily most of the dishes were quite good (although I couldn’t recognize what meat I ate…)!
In the afternoon we, the whole team, met a Seeed Studio to keep on working. JB worked the whole afternoon on the design of our future deposit boxes (they are really starting to look good!). Alexis worked and finished the mechanical design so we’re going to be able to send the files to the 3D printer!!! (although our first trials or printings were a real disaster I must say, let’s hope that we’ll have more luck in the future!). Lara almost finished our website and Link and I helped Sorina making the PCBs. I learned so many things today! I became the master of the PCBs and actually am pretty proud to say that we even helped all (almost) of the other teams in the making process of the PCBs. So first of all we put the solder paste on our “frame” in order to fix the components on the PCB (that takes way more time that it sounds) and then, we cooked them by putting them in a very big and long oven and then tadaaaaaaa our beautiful PCBs came out with all the components fixed on them! That was actually a great satisfaction (it took all afternoon to get there)!
And in the evening, after a kinda failed Uber trip back to our neighborhood we went to the restaurant to celebrate Lara’s birthday and finally got back to the hotel!
I’m excited to see what we’re going to achieve tomorrow as well! Stay tuned!
And here you can look at a few pictures of today’s work:
