For my mechanical engineering capstone design project, I designed an automatic game piece sorter. I am interested in entering the field of mechatronics and automation after graduation, and this was the perfect project to practice relevant skills. This device sorts game pieces from the board game Ticket To Ride: Rails & Sails. There are 5 […]
Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails is a Euro-style board game that has players building a combination of train routes and shipping lines to complete connections between various cities for points. It’s fun, but if you’re looking to purchase your first Ticket to Ride, I recommend the Europe edition instead since it is less complicated […]
I worked during summer 2020 at Ocean Networks Canada, a company that streams real-time data collected from instrument arrays placed on the ocean floor. They have a backbone underwater cable that all the arrays connect to through a series of nodes. During recovery of one of the instrument arrays, staff noticed that the platform’s legs […]
At one of my workplaces, we used high DC voltages (375V) for our instruments. To create a more consistent setup than an assorted 10 mixed power supplies, someone in the past had set up the racks. Each rack contains voltage conversion circuitry to step down to the labeled voltage, and a TCP server that be […]
At one of my co-op work terms, the company had a 3D printer that was used for printing various fixtures as well as faster prototypes. The printer was stationed in a supply closet, so they asked me to use an old ethernet camera so the print’s progress could be monitored remotely. After looking into it, […]
At my third engineering co-op job, I was presented the opportunity to design a new lifting point for our autonomous underwater glider. The original lift point now had a scientific instrument strapped to the top of it, meaning a new lift point was required. The lift point would primarily be used during deployment and recovery […]
At Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) there is a relatively small saltwater cylinder tank that they use to test their scientific instruments. The main type of instrument tested in this tank is called a CTD, which measures conductivity, temperature, and pressure (depth). They sometimes also measure turbidity, oxygen content, or other data. These instruments are calibrated […]
During the Covid-19 pandemic, I’ve had extra time for hobby electronics. I ordered some ESP8266 microcontrollers and decided to use the skills that I had developed for my digital clock and Google Calendar automation task. I made a box that lights up an RGB LED to the colour of a currently-occurring calendar event, and a […]
This project was the main topic of my MECH 458 class (Mechatronics). We were tasked to wire an AT90USB1287 microcontroller to the black terminal block, and program it to sort objects as quickly and as accurately as possible. The system sorts 4 different types of objects into categories based on their reflectivities: black plastic, white […]
A lot of people expressed interest in my shortcut keyboard from an old cash register, there were even a few articles written about it! I decided to make another one for a gift, but this time made with parts that anyone could buy online. If you’re looking for information to make one of these yourself, […]
This spring, as I was perusing the engineering building’s “free” pile for goodies, I found a gem – an all-in-one cash register! It had all sorts of great stuff in it: A keypad with mechanical switches, Vacuum Flourescent Displays, and even a turnkey switch. I just had to have it, so I lugged it to […]
For our 3rd year Engineering Design class, myself and a group of six other students were tasked to design a suspension system that would enable a six-wheeled robot to navigate speed bumps and accessibility ramps. The current design had two interior drive wheels, and four exterior casters for balance. The old design makes movement easy […]
In our design of mechanical elements class, groups of four were tasked to design a gear box, taking into account the failure criterion of each component. In this class, we learned how to calculate safety factors, determine factors for infinite life of components. We mostly used Von Mises stress in these calculations. Our textbook was […]
At my first engineering co-op, we sometimes had unplanned outages. After an outage, there also was little communication on how long outages had lasted, what systems were affected, and what was being done to stop them from happening in the future. My manager felt that we could use some more transparency with these events, so […]
During my first engineering co-op I was tasked with the automation of various tasks, using the power of scripts. My first major project was for the training coordinator for the company, to try to take some of the tedious manual work off of her plate. The current method for on-boarding new hires was that a […]
This project began as an exercise to keep in coding shape over the winter break. I chose C++ because that was the language that I had most recently used at school, so was most comfortable with. Similarily, Qt was chosen for the GUI aspect simply because of its popularity, and was the first one I […]
I’ve learned that the best way to learn something you don’t know much about is to take on a project. I wanted to learn how to do more things with electrical circuits, so I decided to design and build a digital alarm clock with full functionality. While this project seems relatively simple, much was learned […]
Seven segment display My first full (soldered and no exposed wires) electronics project that I wanted to tackle was a digital alarm clock with full functionality. I broke this project up into different sections as I came across different obstacles. One stipulation for this project is I wanted to use regular red LEDs – so […]
I was inspired by the channel Ben Eater, and his videos on making various components of an 8-bit breadboard computer. (https://youtu.be/wvJc9CZcvBc) I watched his video where he made a binary 4-bit adder using nothing but AND, OR, and XOR gates. I took his logic diagram, bought some components, and made it on breadboard. I learned a […]
Ocean Networks Canada had a project that they posed to us: They needed an underwater robot that could connect a cable from the source to a target. For the scope of this project, our goal was to make a robot based out of VEX components that could connect a loop of string onto a hook […]