Projects, assignments, and activities pursued throughout my college career
During my time at Tufts, my commitments and work has been spread across multiple areas of study due to my interests in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering. As a result, my assorted classwork highlighted in this website is taken from courses such as: Introduction to Electronics and Machine Design. Project work is performed at the NOLOP Makerspace in the Science Engineering Complex.
Work in Bray Lab
Horizontal and Vertical Bandsaws
In Machine Design, one of our projects involved constructing a wall hook from a single bar of aluminum. The first steps involved cutting the pieces to a +/- .02 inch threshold. We had to iterate over multiple pieces as this was a learning process for us.
Drill Press and Countersink
After cutting the correct piece lengths, we had to drill, countersink, and tap threads in order to attach each piece together to create our final product. Not shown in any pictures here, but we also utilized the Jump Press in order to cut smaller pieces of metal for the “hook” part of our wall hook.
PCB Designs
OSH Park PCB Order
In my Intro to Electronics class, we learned the full stack workflow in designing and creating our own PCBs using KiCad. Above is an ordered PCB for a 5V converter. I used this to limit power when working with personal electronics projects.
H-Bridge Schematic
Another project in my Electronics course involved building our own H-Bridge using MOSFETS. Learning about this helped my partner and I understand how the stepper motors within our motorized chess board can be hacked to move with our Raspberry Pi
3V / 5V Converter Diagram
This was the design used to create the 3 and 5 volt converter PCB on the left. Having multiple methods to design and work with electronics allows for easier debugging and understanding of more complex systems.
Automatic Chess Board Project
Here is the original dual Arduino setup of our two-axis motor system. Each Arduino is connected to a powerful H-Bridge that transmits correct movements to our motors. We tried to employ the Master/Slave connection between two Arduinos but ran into issues quite quickly. We scrapped the dual Arduino setup and transitioned to running both motors using a Raspberry Pi with multithreading capabilities.
This is our Version 1 base, board, and motor system used to demo 10 correct chess moves in our Intro to Electronics class. We 3D printed chess pieces and attached magnets to their respective bases, then used a linear actuator attached to our two-axis motor system to move the chess pieces along the board.
Testing the Chess Board
We needed to test the latency of our stepper motors with a given board by allowing the motor to move exactly the distance between centers of each square on a chess board. We got up to .1 cm error on moves. On later iterations of our project we hope to pursue an error of ~.001 cm in order to minimize wrong moves and optimize long term motor movement.
Phone-Away Timer
A personal project that prevents users from using their phone for a certain amount of time
Users place their phone on top of a box, set up a timer by pressing 3 buttons representing hours, minutes, and seconds, then start the timer
If users decide to pick up the phone with time remaining, loud speakers emit a very annoying sound until the phone is returned to its location on top of the box
Demo Code
This is the code used to display the timer on the LCD screen for the Phone-Away project. I had to implement my own printable time module that displayed time correctly. This code ran after another program handled the button set-up to determine the time desired to run Phone-Away.
Test Run
After a test run, the LCD screen informs the user that the timer has completed and they may pick up their phone. The potentiometer situated in the bottom left of the breadboard varies the volume of the speaker units. I used a Raspberry Pi 3+ to store the code and run the program for my demo.
Full Set Up
This shows the full testing setup. An external screen is connected to the Raspberry Pi in order to help debug issues. This set up was then condensed inside the acrylic box when presenting the demo.