Overview

In order to assess the ease of maintenance of our product, we timed how long it took us to access the electronic system that is encased in the acrylic housing. We recorded the time it took to pick up a drill, unscrew eight screws with a cordless drill, and remove the acrylic box. The timer was stopped when we unlatched the waterproof box inside the acrylic housing. The test data is shown in the table below.

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Analysis

The metric that we tested was for the electronics box to be accessed in less than 10 minutes when the buoy was fully assembled. The mean time for the trials was about 31 seconds and the standard deviation was about 7 seconds. From the mean time, it is easy to see that we are far below one minute, let alone 10. The small standard deviation shows that the time required to access the electronics is consistent thanks to the simplicity of the housing attachment system. Two testers took turns accessing the electronics box, and since there was low variability between testers, it shows that similar results could be obtained by any user.