*Click on any skill to see where I applied it!
<aside> ✅ Resilience
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<aside> ✅ Entrepreneurship
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<aside> ✅ Creativity
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<aside> ✅ Perseverance
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<aside> ✅ Coding
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<aside> 💡 Our Team’s Objective: Design a device that assists individuals with reduced hand dexterity and memory to squeeze toothpaste and remember how many times they have brushed in the day.
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My group and I initially came up with the idea of helping individuals with low hand dexterity to stir food. Our design consisted of a force sensor which, when under the pressure of food, would activate the stirring motor (right). After working on our idea for 3 weeks, we had to present it to our professors. However, when we presented our idea, we were asked, “Couldn’t the force sensor be replaced by a button?” We realized that our design was unnecessarily using costly components. However, we had to use a sensor in our design somewhere. Coming so far into the project, and with the deadline looming in about 2 weeks, my group was stressed! I encouraged my group members to persevere and create a new design. I scheduled a few meetings, and in about a week, we had a new design ready.
<aside> 🌟 What I Learned: Not only did this experience make me proficient in being resilient, it made me realize that real-life factors, such as cost and feasibility, should be prioritized in a project.
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Sketches of force stirring mechanism
Team meeting for project development
<aside> 🌟 What I Learned: If a design seems hard to work with, expanding the target demographic is an excellent way to overcome barriers.
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We still needed 1 more output process. Considering we were now targeting individuals with memory loss, I thought that perhaps such an individual might accidentally leave their toothbrush in front of the sensor. This would cause all the toothpaste to be squeezed out! I suggested the idea of incorporating a buzzer into the design. The sensor we had chosen detected how far an object placed directly in front of it was. I developed code such that if these distance values are small (i.e., something is in front of the sensor) and the same for a long time (i.e., the object has been forgotten), then the buzzer turns on.
By the end of a few meetings, we had decided that we wanted to make something which would automatically squeeze toothpaste. Under the given criteria, this would count as moving something. However, we still had to perform 2 processes on sensor data and communicate with the user for each process. I suggested that we could expand the target demographic of our device. By focusing our design for individuals with memory loss, my group was able to come up with 1 output process. We thought that the device could realize how many times the user had brushed throughout the day based on sensor data and light up the respective number of LEDs.
Buzzer with wire attachment (Photo credit: Seeedstudio)
<aside> 🌟 What I Learned: It is often difficult to control how a product is used. Therefore, it should be designed with accidental use in mind.
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Raspberry Pi with SD card highlighted
<aside> 🌟 What I Learned: Along with learning to be perseverant, I learned that I should always handle electronics with the utmost care.
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By this point, our prototype was almost ready. Our design involved the use of a Raspberry Pi (left), which uses an SD card to store files. When I was testing the prototype, I accidentally broke the SD card. Everything stopped working. We had obtained all of our parts in the beginning of the project from a Lab TA, so I approached him again to buy a new one, but he said he did not provide SD cards separately. Coincidentally, there was a snow storm on the same day, making it difficult to go to a store. However, acknowledging the importance of the SD card, I went to a local electronics store by bus. They were closed. Undeterred, I went back the next day, and successfully obtained an SD card.
Since I was part of the Computational Sub-Team, I worked with my partner to design the entire code in Python. I developed code to take the rolling average of sensor data and perform multiple functions, such as spinning the motor at varying speeds, turning on LEDs, and initiating a buzzer.
<aside> 🌟 What I Learned: Nested repetition structures, nested conditional statements, functions, and object-oriented programming
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DC motor used in project to control squeezing mechanism (Photo Credit: SB Components)
Gear mechanism which pushes roller forward
Gear mechanism which pushes roller forward
Roller (2 white cylinders) moving forward. A toothpaste tube would be placed between the cylinders.
Roller (2 white cylinders) moving forward. A toothpaste tube would be placed between the cylinders.
Device shown with placement of toothbrush. A distance sensor is placed underneath the arc on the left to detect the brush.