Projects

The Robotics project is a team project including 5 teammates and myself. The part of the robot I was Assigned to was the Crane Arm. The crane arm needed to be flexible in both the Y and Z dimension to best manipulate the object it is require to pick up. The regulations state that the arm must fit within the bounding box assigned to the entirety of the robot, meaning that the crane arm needed to be folded in enough to fit.

The first design the crane arm went through was based off of a VEX Robotics crane arm we had. The dimensions were heavily modified to meet requirements, but the overall design was the same. Using parallel mechanisms, the design attempted to reach each requirement with using only 2 servos. However, the design was having difficulty reaching the extremes of the range and the end of the arm was exiting a parallel relationship to the top plane.

The second design was based upon a much simpler idea. There is an acronym that helped design the arm, KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Keeping the design simple and easy to understand helped the final design along as it met each requirement. The only downside to the final design was the amount of servos used (4 and 1 motor). However, with consultation to my partner working on the programming, that would be no issue.

My teacher in the first year of ATC, had a father with a pontoon boat that was damaged because of a storm that had hit. The main areas that were damaged was the seating and storage.

Alongside a partner, we took measurements of the boat and we designed the parts that were damaged in CAD. Once we had designed them in CAD, me and my partner used an AXIOM CNC Machine to machine the parts. The boat parts that were finished were designed well enough that they fit back on the boat.

The flight endurance competition objective is to create a light-weight, self-propelled plane using any supplies available to you.

The difficult aspect of the project was the wing shape. A new design would have used a swept wing design and a lower angle of attack to increase the time it flew for. The plane design used a bi-plane design because of the increase in thrust that it provides.

The objective of the dragster design competition is to design the fastest CO2 car design. In order to do this, many different aerodynamic principles were used in the design of the car.

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) was used to get the base design. The base design led to the more complex design.