*Tell us how your project went. Did you accomplish your objectives? What would you do next to take your design to the next level? You should include a section for lessons learned, any future work ideas, tips for future groups, and any acknowledgments you want to make. Your acknowledgments should be specific people who directly contributed to your project and/or the experience. This can include students in other groups, specific TIW or UT staff, or labs/faculty, grad-students that gave you access to resources or advice.
Conclusions
The autonomous fishing rod our team designed and presented at demonstration day was a clean and functional project. Most of our expectations set at the beginning of the project were met with the combined skills, hard work, and communication from all of the team members. In the initial idea generation and proposal, our concept for the project was to build a fully autonomous fishing rod that casts and reels in the fishing line. However, due to time constraints, we as a group decided to narrow our focus for the scope of the project. The team wanted to focus on creating a smooth casting motion with the bait on the end of the line.
Lessons Learned
Future Work
In the completed build assembly, a green button is included in the box design and is connected to the circuit. The green button did not have a function during demonstration day, however, in the future this button could be programmed to reel in the line after the fishing rod is cast. Other work in the future is redesigning the output link to not be a rigid acrylic link and instead more closely resemble a typical fishing rod with some bending in the line to better simulate the motion of a fishing rod. Due to limited time, our group was unable to scale up the size of the fishing rod from the prototype design. In the future, the autonomous fishing rod will be a more accurate scale of the standard commercial fishing rods.
Acknowledgments
Our group would like to thank TIW and the student workers for helping our group when we needed tools or aid with the laser cutters. We would also like to thank Joe from TIW for cutting our shafts for the bearings. And lastly, our group would like to thank Connor Hennig for helping our group and giving helpful advice and notes on our fishing rod design during our weekly check-ins.