In spring 2023 I took cornerstone of engineering 1 and 2, an 8 credit class that serves as an introduction to the college of engineering. Working in a group of 4, we completed 2 projects over the course of the semester.

Project 1 - Assistive Device

In this project, we developed a product that wold allow a user with limited dexterity in their arms to laucnh a ping pong ball into a cup. We were restricted to only using found materials. Our group constructed the following catapult, which was able to launch the ping pong ball, and could be operated with a single hand with limited mobility.

Project 2 - Science Museum Exhibit

The second project was to construct a science museum exhibit that would teach middle and high school students about a topic in green energy. Our group researched successful museum exhibit characteristics, and brainstormed several ideas. We then selected an idea and created a cardboard prototype. From there we created a final design, and presented it to a group of high school students. Finally, a report was prepared on the project.

My group created an exhibit on how control rods in a nuclear reactor ensure the safe operation in a fission power plant. We created a game using an Arduino and a MATLAB app that would allow the user to change the position of the control rods using a knob on the exhibit. This would cause a set of control rods on our model to move up or down. The Matlab app would then take this information, and show the power level of the reactor. This would be displayed to the user.

I worked on the software that powered the exhibit. I wrote the code that ran on the Arduino and on my laptop in matlab. The Arduino code took input from the potentiometer that the user operated, and calculated a position to move the motor to. The motor was rotated until the shaft encoder detected the motor was at this position. The Arduino sent information about the potentiometer to matlab running on the laptop, whcih would display data to the user. It would also display a leader board with the users score after the user finished.