During my senior year at Olin, I participated in the SCOPE senior capstone project. I worked on a team with 3 classmates to develop, design and build a working prototype for Mitsubishi Electric. We presented at the Trade Show at SXSW 2018, demoing our idea to thousands of people. Our project focused on creating a product concept that would help older adults create and participate in their community through food and cooking. We designed a smart screen that would help connect older adults with cooking classes from their kitchen. The screen would also allow them to video chat their family so they could remotely teach them recipes and techniques passed down for generations. Using a gesture tracking wristband, the user could receive custom feedback to improve their technique.
The Lazer Maze was a full size interactive installation that I created with a team of classmates for a Principles of Engineering course. We wanted to create not just a physical product, but an experience, so we based our half semester long project on the spy movie trope of a maze of security lasers that the hero must maneuver through without breaking any of the beams. Using a raspberry-pi and Arduino, we constructed a series of lasers and photoresistors that registered when a beam was broken and played an alarm. I was the mechanical lead for the project, building the box that the maze was housed in, as well as placing the lasers and the mirrors which allowed us to bounce the beams in a way that made the appearance of more lasers than there actually were. Working with my amazing team, we were able to create an interface that allowed us to time the participants through the maze, adding penalty points for breaking the beams and keeping a scoreboard of fastest time through the maze. One of our goals for this project was to create something that could be built by anyone over a weekend. To accomplish this we created the entire structure for under $300, using 8ft cardboard sheets, PVC pipes, laser pointers and other easy to find supplies.
Fundamentals of Robotics is a course offered at Olin that teaches the basics of creating a robotic system. The year I took the class, our challenge was to work in teams to create an autonomous mini car to drive around campus, racing the other teams and avoiding obstacles. To make the project even more fun, we designed the car to look like the Mystery Machine from Scooby Doo. We assembled the car body, wired up the electronic components, and programmed the robot in C++ and ROS over the course of one semester. Our robot won the final challenge, making it around the course multiple times autonomously navigating using a LIDAR and IR sensors.
String Theory was one of two sculpture projects that I worked on for my Introduction to Mechanical Prototyping class. Working with a team of 4 other people, we were given total freedom over creating a visually appealing sculpture to be installed in the hallway of the Academic Center at Olin. Considering the size and motor limitations that were set for this project, my team aimed to make an artistic piece that was inspired by string models of mathematical functions.
UOCD is the acronym for a course at Olin named User Oriented Collaborative Design. This class’ main purpose is to teach students how to design for a specific user group, putting the needs of the group at the focus. My team of 5 students was assigned volunteer Emergency Medical Technicians as our user group. We spent weeks interviewing EMTs and gathering as much information as we could about them and their lives as responders at traumatic moments. After analyzing the information that we acquired, we moved into the design phase, where we came up with a range of ideas that could offer a solution to a problem that we have seen repeated throughout the EMT community. The problem that we decided to address was burnout and feeling underappreciated by the community. After we narrowed down our ideas based on the information we had from our interviews, we decided on our final idea, a community space merged with the EMT lounge area. This space would allow the EMTs to relax, while also showing the community the work that they do.
Scenic Route is the project that I developed in with Andrew Deaver, Kathryn Hite and Shreya Rangarajan at the PennApps 2016 hackathon. We created the entire project, from idea to final deliverable in a 36 hour period. The goal of the project was to integrate an app and an interactive map to create a road trip planning assistant. We were captivated by the idea of the “All American Road Trip” while we were on the bus to the hackathon, a journey that took us from Boston to Philadelphia. While the rest of the team was working on developing the app, I worked on creating the interactive map. I CADed a map of the United States, as that was our base location, including LEDs for each of the major cities that we were including in the app’s options. By creating a 4x4 matrix, we were able to mark 16 different locations on the map. The app allowed the users to enter in different interests and how many cities that they wanted to visit. It would then sort through the top results for that interest we would create a custom road trip for that person. Connecting the LED map to an Arduino, we integrated the app in such a way that when the user created a new road trip, their path would flash on map. We would love to expand on this project and to market it as a statement piece for travel departments or tourist heavy locations in major cities.
Introduction to Mechanical Design is a course offered at Olin that teaches the basics of designing a full system and creating it in Solidworks. During my time in the class thus far I have created a Farmbot structure and two attachments that could dig holes in the ground to plant seeds in as well as a creative project in which I had to construct my name out of various farm related objects. The class requires mastery of detailed drawings and assembly drawings, advanced Solidworks skills and the ability to use the many simulation features of the program, including FEA analysis and motion studies.
The Kraken was a sculpture project for an Introduction to Mechanical Prototyping course that I took during my freshman year. The only guidelines that the project had was a size constraint of a 1ft square and a limit of one motor. We used the machining and fabrication techniques that we had learned in the class, including basic shop tools, 3D printing, sheet metal tooling and mold/cast methods. The goal of the Kraken was to create an experience for the viewer that evoked the whismical stories of ships on the open seas.
