Day 13

We finally met the interns from Poly today! There are 8 of them, all finishing their fifth and final year here. It was really exciting to get to see who we would be working with for the next month. We did a bunch of introductory/get to know you stuff (like a scavenger hunt, which we placed dead last because we don’t know what a jigsaw looks like haha). But I’m really excited to start working on our projects with them!

Day 14

Francis and Andrew brought some broken syringe pumps and oxygen concentrators from Queens and we got to see how they worked. It was really cool because I had no idea how these devices were used. They opened them up for us and we got to look around and really get an understanding of how these devices may break down. A lot of the potential projects are based around syringe pumps (like a making a device that will stop the machine if the syringe pump starts to overflow with fluid) and oxygen concentrators (like an improved filter that will prevent dust from entering the machine).

We got our projects assigned today and I will be continuing to work on my temperature monitor along with Timothy and Matthews! We are all very excited to start improving the device, so I can’t wait to see the improvements in the next four weeks.

Day 15

We had a microcontrollers crash course today and I had a lot of fun! We learned a lot about how an Arduino works and we wrote some basic codes to turn on LED lights, display things, and read temperature with a thermistor. I really liked how hands-on everything is. I’m learning a lot thanks to Francis and Andrew for letting us play around with different things in the studio. And I think with a better understanding of the Arduino, I will be able to improve my code and my the temperature sensor more sensitive for my device.

Day 16

So the Poly students all have HUGE final projects that they have to present Saturday so they were all scrambling in the design studio to make them perfect. We didn’t want to get in their ways so we practiced using Autodesk Inventor, which is the program the design studio uses to create files that can be sent to the 3D printer. I am VERY bad at drawing, so I was happy to get a lot of practice. I made an elephant which I was very proud of. Maybe I’ll print it.

PS: We went to Mikos and got some ice cream and it was REALLY GOOD.

Day 17

I decided to work on my device some more, and I was pretty upset when I found that the IR is broken. And that was the ONLY IR I had on me. My device was reading numbers like 210 degrees and I am pretty sure that’s not correct. But I think the design studio has some extra IR’s, so hopefully we can use those and readjust our code depending on the model. We were also thinking of going back to a thermistor since they are way cheaper. A thermistor has a longer warm-up time than an IR, so our team back at Rice opted for an infared sensor instead. But I am hoping to do some more tests and see if I can reduce the time to warm-up a thermistor. Oh and today was very exciting because our sixth intern, Kristoffer arrived! So we have our entire team here in Malawi!

Day 18

We drove an hour and a half to the Majete Wildlife Reserve in hopes to spot some animals! We camped over-night (it was pretty nice, except it got VERY COLD) and went on three different safaris. We saw a lot of gazelle-like animals call Nyalas and we saw a family of elephants! It was really cool how close we were to them. We took a boat down the river in the middle of the reserve and saw a bunch of hippos! It was really amazing. Oh personally, warthogs were my favorite animals that we spotted. They are part of a group of animals called the Ugly Five which is rather unfortunate. It’s ok warthogs I appreciate you.