Cinnamon: Cleaning elevated.
Washing windows of tall buildings traditionally requires workers to suspend themselves on the side of a building, from ropes or a dedicated platform. This traditional method of cleaning windows thus results in a dangerous work environment, slow washing times, and expensive bills for building owners.
Cinnamon, LLC was designed as a solution to this problem. Over the course of 2 years, I led a team of 3 other students to design, build, test, and fly a window and solar panel-washing drone.
We competed in an engineering-focused entrepreneurship competition at BYU, called Student Innovator of the Year, placing in the top 7 teams out of more than 50 competitors. We won $4000 to fund the next stages of our business.
Despite initial success, we decided to terminate the business to focus on other interests (other business opportunities, grad school, and jobs).
Achievements and Contributions
This project was a highly collaborative effort with 3 other students over the course of 2 years. Not all of my accomplishments or the things I learned can be listed here. Here is an abbreviated list:
- Led a team of 3 students for over 2 years, conducting weekly meetings and coordinating efforts
- Built 3 prototypes from the ground up, all of which had at least basic functionality to carry a hose and spray water
- Safety pilot for many, many flight tests
- Placed in top 7 teams out of 50+ in an entrepreneurship competition, winning $4000
- Analyzed required design of third prototype to perform window washing (specifying motor/prop combos to achieve required thrust, battery sizes, electrical system)
- Conducted a DFMEA study to analyze key risks in our system
- Performed bench tests (with appropriate data collection) to test attributes including: overheating of our ESCs, thrust curves for our motor/props, max expected current under load
- Helped design custom heat sink for the ESCs to mitigate overheating while maintaining water-proofness
Please reach out for more information! I am happy to talk more about what we did and learned.
Detailed description
⚠️🚧 Under Construction 🚧⚠️ The rest of this page is under (semi)active construction. Please check back soon or reach out!
Why Cinnamon?
The name Cinnamon was chosen for our drone-based cleaning system. Cinnamon, along with flavors like mint or wintergreen are commonly used in toothpaste to induce a residual “clean” feel in the mouth after use. This “clean feel” is what we wanted customers to experience after using our drone-based cleaning solution.
Understanding the system
Throughout the design process we built 3 prototypes, each with increased capability and safety. Our final prototype was built from scratch for around $1000.
