Meet our Clients! (Pt. 1)
This semester (Spring ‘20), Generate is working with six clients, four hardware-focused and two software-focused. Get to know more about them directly from their project leads! This is part one of a two part series to get to learn more about Generate and the clients we work with. Stay tuned for the next blog.
Goodsticks
By Sara Liebler
Goodsticks is a dispenser for novel, environmentally friendly eating utensils that eliminates the need for individual packaging. Client Molly Rahman graduated from Northeastern with a degree in Communications Studies. She later received her master’s degree in Sustainable Design from Boston Architectural College. She works with a research and development team to create chopsticks that are edible and fully biodegradable. Her product attempts to reduce the problem of plastic waste in the food industry.
Generate’s role is to build a dispenser that provides two chopsticks reliably, preserves the freshness of the chopsticks, and create an intuitive and enjoyable user experience.
The dispenser will be used in large dining areas such as dining halls or food courts. The Goodsticks team in Generate is comprised of mechanical engineers who are working to build an engineering prototype for Molly to use during demos and product trials. They met with her to try out the chopsticks, demonstrate prototypes, and refine the product requirements. So far, the team has prototyped two dispensing mechanisms and selected one to continue iterating upon. They are currently working on a functional full prototype for user testing in late February. The biggest challenges are creating airtight seals to preserve the freshness of the chopsticks and finding materials that will be durable and food safe, all the while managing an ambitious timeline.
Driftio
By Christopher Owen
Driftio is a fully modular sensory device designed for pipelines to monitor flow efficiency and consequently reduce waste and unnecessary costs to businesses. The device installs directly into pipelines and takes continuous readings that remotely pair with a computer algorithm pricing waste production and making environmental consciousness economical for plants.
Businesses today waste millions of dollars due to material flow inefficiencies. Investing in newer technologies is expensive and guarantees no improvement. Driftio seeks to deliver the ability to monitor facilities and locate inefficiencies is an extremely valuable asset for plant design. It utilizes a robust economization algorithm that takes values collected in real time from the device and calculates flow efficiency as a metric for economic losses. Thus, this product must be designed with consideration for flow parameters necessary to those calculations without interfering with the flow itself as it travels through the device and its relative sensors.
Smart manufacturing will play a massive role in the fourth industrial revolution. The industrial world is rapidly migrating towards digital practices and Driftio will directly benefit remote facility monitoring. By establishing a mesh network of devices, one can imagine a Driftio “smart grid” within a factory setting communicating key failures to plant managers and dollar losses to executives.
Generate is working to design a functional prototype of the Driftio sensory device. The team is diverse with two mechanical engineers, two electrical/computer engineers, an applied physics major, and a chemical engineer project lead. The mechanical team is working to design a robust system architecture and electronics enclosure as well as testing rigs for the device at various flow rates. On the electrical side, the electrical team is working to integrate various sensors to the design, all necessary power management systems for the device, and wireless connectivity functionality for live remote data streaming. Those data will feed into the client’s algorithm and calculate any and all losses.
Butter
By Cullen Lampasso
Butter connects local users with high quality restaurants in their own area. Currently, the main platforms for restaurant exploration, such as Yelp and Google Maps, are constructed around the idea of a review. Reviews on these platforms are typically based on experiences that are so extreme that they cause the reviewer to go out of their way to leave a rating. This create an inaccurate representation of an average experience at a given location.
Butter is trying to connect local users with high quality restaurants in their own areas.
Currently, the main platforms for restaurant exploration (Yelp, Google Maps…) are constructed around the idea of a review. Reviews on these platforms are typically based on experiences that were so extreme that they caused the reviewer to go out of their way to leave a rating. This creates an inaccurate representation of an average experience at a given venue.
Butter is shifting the industry from reviews to recommendations. Butter’s recommendations are crafted by verified users. Recommenders visit venues with the specific intention of writing a recommendation. These recommendations highlight the features and qualities of a restaurant in order to provide other users with a glimpse of an average experience. Generate is working on converting this vision into a mobile application. At the end of the semester, Generate will provide Butter with a minimum viable product which will contain the core features and aesthetics needed for initial launch.
We want the recommendations to be standardized for consistency and readability while also allowing recommenders flexibility to express their own individual experience of their visit. We have been communicating within our own team to brainstorm ideas while keeping close contact with the client so that we might find the optimal solution for their product.
We look forward to creating this mobile app for our client from the ground up. Our engineers are building out the back end of the application and integrating it with a front end. Simultaneously our designers are crafting this front end in order to optimize the experiences of Butter’s future users.
