My old engineering manager from the days when I was designing jet fighters had a standard response to any idea or suggestion: “show me the drawing”. His position was that you did not actually have anything worth discussing until you could show at least a sketch.
And he was right. Words and word pictures are just the beginning of an engineering design. They are, at best, the parameters of a design. Until you have a drawing – at least a sketch – you don’t have anything real.
Creating a drawing makes you think things through. The initial sketch isn’t a finished design. Engineering design is an iterative process. It starts with a rough concept that goes through multiple stages of changes. Hopefully these changes are improvements and refinements.
The goal of an initial design, often called a conceptual design, is to quickly explore multiple alternatives, to identify major subsystems, and to allow you to begin the process of breaking an overall design down into individual pieces that can be worked on.
You usually build prototypes of your design. This is important in the early design phases to make sure that your ideas actually work. It is also important later in the design to make sure that all of the pieces actually fit together.
The most critical part of the Wizard Staff is the orb. If we can build a good orb and attach it to the staff the project will be successful.
We’ve got our starting point: build a prototype of the orb and how it will be attached to the staff. There are several sub-goals for this prototype:
- Make something that looks good. The staff must both look good and work well.
- Make something that works. Whatever we come up with will ultimately be stuck on the end of a stick, waved around, and abused. It must be strong enough to survive routine handling.
- Prove the core technology. Use LED strip lights to create a dynamic light show inside the orb and possibly inside the body of the staff. If we can’t build something exciting there is no point going any further.
- Build a structure that will support the LED strips inside the orb and let us work on them. This is important while building the orb and for later maintenance and improvements.