Overview

To ensure our product is durable enough to survive the actual environment it will be exposed to, we conducted two types of durability tests.

For the first test, we threw the buoy into water without the electronics attached to the top to see if the buoy was capable of coming to an upright position, no matter the orientation it was thrown. We threw the buoy in the SRC pool three times, tossed the buoy from the diving board once, and threw the buoy in Hawthorn Park once to test the durability. 

For the second test, we launched (placed) the buoy with the electronics attached in the Hawthorn Park ten times to ensure no pieces of the buoy came apart/chipped away.

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Analysis

After conducting both tests, there was no observable damage. When we conducted the first durability test, we were able to observe a miniscule amount of expanding foam that chipped away from the buoy body. However, when we conducted the same test after painting the buoy, we solved all of the chipping of expanding foam. For the pool testing, the buoy always oriented itself rightside up, but with the electronics attached at Hawthorn, it was much less stable, despite adding as much ballast as possible in the interior of the buoy. With the Hawthorn testing, we pass our metric that “no pieces of the buoy fall off during launch and removal after 10 repetitions.”