Dates: January to March 2014

Working with three other classmates, our fourth year design project was a custom electric longboard for use in commuting. Check out the video for the details (It won a department award for best advertisement)!

In addition to getting a chance to work with some RC components to put together something fun, we also managed to win a small award for best project -voted on by former Mechatronics engineering alumni!

Dates: January 2013 to March 2013

For our project design course in third year, my class was given the task of working in groups of five to design and build an autonomous boat that could navigate a rectangular pool of water. Being a competition, each boat’s performance was determined by measuring by it’s speed in the water with respect to it’s mass. In our boat design, my group used three IR distance sensors interfaced to an arduino microcontroller and a protoboard shield to detect the surroundings. Control was provided by using a proportional feedback system that controlled an RC boat rudder. As the lead mechanical designer and builder of the group, I spent a number of hours over the 3 week build period working with my team members to construct and optimize the shape and structure of our boat. We ran into a number of issues when testing and optimizing our boat design, including:

• hull planing and hydrodynamic drag
• electronics waterproofing
• high motor current draw and transistor overheating
• weight balance and instability
• motor vibration

Thankfully our hard work and testing paid off on competition day, with my group completing a lap in 11.5 seconds and tying for 1st place out of the 22 competing boats (see the video below)!

Dates: June 2010 to Present

A 3D printer in layman’s terms takes a computer drawing of an object (for example something rendered in Solidworks for example), and produces a physical representation of the object by melting and depositing a thermoplastic layer by layer.

Inspired by the open source Reprap project, my friend David and I got together in the summer of 2010 to try and design and construct our own 3D printer. Because of the busy lives we both have (and the effects of co-op), progress has been slow. We are committed to finishing it off though however.

Mechanical/Electrical Design:

The mechanical systems of the printer are our own design and construction. The most important mechanical components are the cartesian stages (x,y,z) in which the printhead moves. I went through a couple of design iterations for the motion of the stages. The first design had the z stage rising on four separate threaded rods, connected together with a long timing belt (left image, with the four cylinders holding up the platform). Movement in the x and y axes was to be provided by using brass bushings and aluminum rod. This proved to be problematic because of the difficulty of securing bushings to a moving stage and the large amount of friction associated with the movement.

The second design iteration (central image) consisted of replacing the bushing and rod bearing with teflon and polycarbonate glides. This again was abandoned because of perceived problems with friction and construction difficulty. The final design consisted of using the frame of the machine as the bearing guides themselves, and crafting custom slides using ball bearings and larger aluminum angle (right image). This solved any friction issues, and also allowed for greater movement in the x-y direction. The z stage was also modified and became a cantilevered surface, rather than four distinct risers. This made the construction much more simple, and allowed the z stage to be driven directly by a stepper motor rather than through a timing belt.

The electronics of the printer are also fairly simple at the moment. An Arduino Mega microcontroller hooked up to four stepper motor drivers (one for each stage, and one for the extruder mechanism). We’ve got a board dedicated for the plastic melting mechanism, but that hasn’t been finalized or hooked up yet. The next steps on the project are the creation of the hot end, and finally the software to make the machine start printing.

We’ve got a blogger blog going on that documents our (slow) progress on the machine. Click on heading of this page to check it out!

Dates: September 2006 to April 2009
Project link: here

Every year NASA and the National Space Society (NSS) host an international contest for middle and high school students to design a permanent space station concept that could be built in 50 years. I participated in the contest for three years, and in my final year of high school I managed to win the contest! As a grand prize winner, I got to attend and present my project at the 2009 International Space Development Conference (ISDC 2009) in Orlando Florida, where I got to meet various members of the aerospace industry, as well as have Buzz Aldrin (the 2nd man on the moon) present my award!

Although it is merely a concept with no future of being built, the contest was a chance for me to demonstrate my logical thinking and creativity skills, and apply it to a design problem. I took the contest as an opportunity to design something realistic, so I spent 6 months between September and March researching systems, vehicles and materials used in past space missions. Concepts such as modularity, mass production, and existing technology were all ideals i tried to incorporate in the design.