Week 8

This week some of the mechanical parts were completed.

What can be seen inside the metal component is a wound-up spring part, which was reverse engineered from a retractable key chain holder. The idea behind its use in our design is to avoid intermittent energy from the footsteps and instead get a constant flow of energy from the gear train to the generator. This will allow for a more efficient way of energy conversion. 

The shaft needs to be shortened so it fits in the shoe and the shaft needs to be connected to the gear train. A way to keep the gears in place also needs to be designed and fabricated. Once all the parts are placed into the shoe, the only thing left to do will be to test the product to make sure that it works and to compare the results to theoretical output.