My final prototype is the fishing bite alarm which has been developing throughout the semester. I have walked through all stages of the design thinking during my design process of the fishing bite. From observing and engaging fishing with my dad, I found the problems he had with his fishing detector: easily to fallen off, couldn’t been heard and seen easily at night. After defining the problems, I had brainstorm and some possible solutions based on problems I observed, then built the first version prototype shown bellow:
Version 1
The older version has one LED light, which can be seen from far. It also has a sound that one can hear from a distance when there is a fishing on biting. The older version of the fishing bite alarm has a spiral screw that one uses to twist until a fishing line is tied to the alarm. It won’t easily fallen off.
The designed was improved after I had a conversation with my potential customers. I got really valuable feedback from my dad’s friend who was a fishing enthusiast. I found out new problems that most of the fishman had: they were often misled by the false alarm. The alarm would ring by other forces like wind or other moving objects in the water pulled the fishing line. He suggested me to improve the spiral screw, because the tiny screw was not easy to rotate by big hands. In addition, he told me that it might work better if there was an indicator to show the position of the rod. By showing my visual prototype to my dad’s friend, it allowed me to learn, gain insight and test my prototype on the actual users who would use it and help me made decision on how to move forward and what needs to be improved. Based on new defined problems, I have refined my design shown below:
Version 2
One of the new features in this redefined fishing alarm is the addition of one LED Light. This means the alarm has two LED lights in total, a red and yellow one. The yellow Led light is designed in a way that it shows the fishing rod position at all times. Whenever there is a fish bite, the yellow light automatically goes off , the red light will be on and the alarm rings to indicator that a fish has been caught by the fishing rod. The volume of the sound can be adjusted by spinning the gray volume control knob. It avoids noise in the quiet environment. Other feature is that the design is integrated with motion sensitive system, it avoids noise caused by other forces like water wave or wind. It ensures that fishermen do not end up being misled by a false alarm. In addition, the spiral screw is replaced by “the watch strips”. It is adjustable and made it firmly and tied on different sizes of the rods.
Having showing the physical prototype and conversation with my potential customers, it allows me to learn, gain insight. It also allows me to test my prototype on the actual users who will use it to determine how I might move forward and refine. It truly help to develop my design, make it better and fit my customer’s needs and wants.
The following is the video of my product description:
It’s great to see your fishing bite grow over the course of the semester. The little text effects in the video are also very helpful.
Great to see how the final product looks now. Really useful for many newbies like myself or even pros
I do not go fishing, but I can see this being helpful for those who do. As others said, your product has really evolved during the semester! Great job. I have questions about the lights, would you be able to see them from above the water? Or is it tied to another system the person has on board (or maybe an app)?
The light is flashing when there is a bite. It is bright enough to catch your attention.
Thank you! I am so glad to hear that.
Thank you for liking my product. Hope it will exist in the market and help to make fishing easier.
I really like your Tinkercad skills, the final design looks really great. And I like how the video is very clear – the text that pops up is also helpful to show all the features. Nice work!
Really nice job and I like how the product evolved over the semester!
I can tell you really adapted the prototype from its first iteration based on your observations of your dad fishing, to incorporating his feedback, and, I recall, continuously observing him fishing and finding new discoveries when you saw the difficulties he had when fishing at night. Your final prototype seems to address all of the problems that you noticed arose throughout the past few weeks.
Your video is clear and explains every feature of your prototype. It seems like a simple product that is not all that complicated to use and understand. This makes it more likely that any type of fishermen/women would adopt it. Nice job!