updates from quarantine

A few weeks ago we were told that MIT would be shutting down and we would all be kicked off campus due to the coronavirus pandemic. For some of us, 2.008 lab was the very last class we ever attended in college :')

Class was put on hold for a bit while everyone scrambled to move out and professors worked on plans for virtualization, but now here we are, spread out across the country but still determined to perfect our cocktail yo-yo.

This weekend, the team met up on Zoom for the very first time since the apocalypse started. We finally had everyone together at once, so we took our group picture.

The following day however we added another member to our team so actually we still don't have a full group picture. Hector's team is proud to announce that Hector has officially joined, due to everyone on his *other* team dropping the class.

After a group cry, the first productive thing we did on our Zoom call was finalizing our yo-yo design.

Having the lime on the glass was nicer on the eyes but was giving us too many problems due to its complex shape and method of attachment, so we changed the design to have the lime press-fit onto the liquid, mimicing floating.

We al also decided to go with the single spacer design over the double spacer design.

Since the global pandemic has left us without access to a real injection molding machine (sad), we all downloaded Autodesk's Moldflow Adviser to simulate the injection molding conditions and outcome of each of our parts. Moldflow is slow and non-intuitive but thankfully we had a handy how-to that shop staff made so that we wouldn't be confused. Unfortunately the first time around most of us didn't actually use that document and were confused as to why our results kept showing 100% bad on every analysis. Don't worry though because now we've got it on lock.

We input our machine parameters and preformed gate location, pack and fill, and warp analyses. Here are the results:

for the bottom liquid piece, the shrinkage comes out to 1.25%

for the lime, we see 1.07% shrinkage. 

the liquid cap shows 0.89% shrinkage.

We did decide to keep the lime as just one piece, but since it is thick&chunky^TM we were worried about the quality of the fill.

Moldflow shows that the quality is likely *ok* but we might have issues with the cooling. If we weren't doing online school we would ignore this warning and test it anyway to see how it comes out in real life but we can't do that so our next steps for the lime will just be discussing these results with the shop staff. 

In conclusion we hope we can manufacture our yoyo irl at some point because zoom is sad and simulations are sad and cocktails are good.