Engineering Projects
Roblocks
For Cornerstone of Engineering class, we were asked to design an educational game for children incorporating mechanical and electrical components. Our designs would later be presented at the Boston’s Children Museum where children would interact with our game.
Play testing Roblocks at the Boston's Children Museum
We decided on the idea of a puzzle that helped teach children the concept of circuits. On our puzzle, we had 4 circuits that needed to be completed. The circuits were connected to 3 LEDs and 1 piezo speaker that were built into a 3D printed robot head.
The aim of the game was to help the robot wake up for school in the morning. Each time a circuit was completed, one element of his face would ‘wake up’, for example his left eye.
Roblocks game
3D printed robot head containing LED's
In my team, I took on the mechanical design and building role. I used a bandsaw and filing machine for the wood pieces and copper strapping for the circuit.
One design problem that came up was the electrical connections between each puzzle piece were faulty due to the irregular shape of the copper post bending. I overcame this problem by adding copper mesh to the base of the puzzle that would meet each copper strip when placed on the board.
Piece connects to board via velcro
Copper mesh added to improve electrical connection
When we presented this to the children at the Museum, our game ran smoothly with little to no faults and the children were quick to learn the concept of circuitry. It was a lot of fun to watch the parents enjoy the game as well.
Foam Fixture
A thermal system prototype had a poorly insulated door that drastically affected the power efficiency. I wanted to find a foam to insulate the door that would require the least amount of force to compress it at a known distance to increase the system's efficiency and performance.
On Solidworks, I created a modular fixture designed for an Instron to test two different types of foam to find their compressive force. I had to iterate the design a few times to adjust to 3D printing tolerances. Once the fixture was made, I ran tests on the Instron machine to find the foam with the smallest compressive force. I plotted the data using Excel and found that the foam for the job was Buna-N and the power efficiency improved by 20%.
3D printed foam fixture
SolidWorks Model of foam fixture
Instruction Manual
This project was inspired by engineering for an English class. One of our main assignments was to analyze a type of document within our discipline. As I had written an assembly procedure during my coop at Waters Corp., I decided to analyze instruction manuals. Click the link below for a PowerPoint presentation on how to write IKEA Instruction Manuals.