Underwater Robotics Acoustics Testing Platform
As a member of AquaPack’s mechanical design team, I was tasked with designing the internals for an acoustics circuit testing platform. The platform was intended to test various acoustic filtering circuits underwater. It had to house a variety of components, including four breadboards (which contained the acoustic filtering circuits), a Pico Oscilloscope, a battery pack, a Raspberry Pi, and four 9V batteries.
Make-A-Thon Sustainable Design Competition:
Sanitary Towel Dispenser
I competed in NC State’s annual Make-A-Thon competition, which challenges teams to design sustainable solutions for existing problems. My teammate and I designed a self-sanitizing reusable cloth towel dispenser with multiple cleaning stages. The towel is sanitized using a cleaning solution bath, UV radiation, and convection heating. The goal of the reusable towel dispenser was to eliminate paper towel waste while avoiding unhygienic alternatives, such as air dryers. Our team won third place out of 27 teams.
CNC Machine Table
I designed and built a custom table for my Sandbox CNC machine. I wanted something that utilized the space beneath the CNC machine that would otherwise be wasted. The table was designed to store lumber for projects, CNC accessories, and a Shop-Vac system for dust control.
The table was fabricated out of 2x4s, 2x6s, 4x4s, and 5mm plywood. Heavy load caster wheels were added to mobilize the table.
Pac-Man Joystick Controllers
I was asked to design and fabricate joystick controllers for a 3D Pac-Man exhibit. The controllers had to fit the necessary hardware (joystick, button, battery pack, etc.) which were specified by Dr. Clement Shimizu, while also being ergonomic and easy to use. My final design centered the joystick on a circular housing embellished with Pac-Man. The controllers were colored to match each of the players within the game.
Independent Dual Extrusion (IDEX) 3D Printer Modification
I modified a Cartesian-style 3D printer with a custom IDEX setup. Typical IDEX 3D printers have two separate hotend carriages that are coupled in the y-axis but independent in the x-axis. IDEX 3D printing can be used for dual extrusion 3D printing for multi-material or multi-color parts, but it can also be used to print to duplicate parts simultaneously (or even two parts that are mirrored in the x-axis). A new 3D printer motherboard, configured with a custom Marlin 2.0 profile, was also installed on the machine as part of this project.
Underwater Robotics 3D Printer Table
This is another table that I designed, this time for AquaPack’s Raise3D Pro2 3D printer. The AquaPacks club’s room is quite small, so I wanted to make something that would provide a lot of storage. It was also designed for simple assembly, and we were able to build the entire table in one evening.
Telescope Auto-Tracking Stepper Motor Mount
This was a quick project designing a stepper motor mount for an after market auto-tracking telescope add-on. The main challenge of this project was the limited mounting options for the stepper motor. The solution that I came up with was to clamp to the (static) housing that contained the adjustment knob. The mount was 3D printed in two halves.
