Portfolio - RoboticMayhem

Olin REVO (Research of Electric Vehicles at Olin)

REVO is a club I co-founded at Olin specifically to work more in depth with EV's and to educate students at Olin on EV design and manufacturing. Since I started the club in my sophmore year, it has grown into a place people can come and work on EV projects that interest them. We currently have students building custom Battery Management Systems, Regenerative Braking circuits, Motor Controllers, welded tube frames, and more. Check out the site (OlinREVO.org) for more on the club's activities and how you can help sponsor our work.

Elecanisms: Clawcopter

In the fall semester of my senior year at Olin, I took a class called elecanisms which focused on creating integrated mechatronics devices. These aren't necessarily robots, but they do fuse hardware, electronics, and software. Here we aren't using Arduinos and breadboards, this class has us programming in C and Python as well as making our own Printed Circuit Boards. Serious stuff. My final project in the class was a "Clawcopter" which is exactly what it sounds like: a quadcopter with an underactuated claw underneath. When all said and done, it weighed in at about 8 pounds and had a 10 pound lift capacity.

Barrett Technology: Liquid Cooled Motor

One of the few companies I've been at that didn't make me sign a strict NDA and encouraged me to share my most interesting work was Barrett. One of the projects I'm most proud of from working with them was the design and build of a liquid cooled motor. I created models and drawings in Solidworks, paying close attention to the tolerances involved and had parts sent out to a shop to be built. Follow the break for a step-by-step process to build one of my motors.

Design of Energy Systems: Hybrid Vehicle Conversion and Control

In my Junior year at Olin college, I worked with Mark Muraoka, a friend of many years, to convert an electric remote controlled vehicle to a hybrid. The goal of the hybrid was to simultaneously increase performance and range, while using a minimally affecting effeciency. We used two brushed DC motors with separate controllers and a 2.5cc nitro engine controlled with a servo to drive. Each power source was controlled with an Arduino taking input from the remote control reciever. The end result could easily reach 40mph and would only burn it's onboard fuel when the nitro engine was most efficient.

Boeing

Boeing builds nearly anything you can imagine, but what they're best known for is their commercial jet business. I worked in their Flight Controls PD (Product Development) department, on projects meant for airplanes ten years or so away. This mostly means that I can't talk about most of what I did there, but I can say that I was working on next generation aircraft wings. Boeing's main focus when building aircraft today is efficiency. Specifically, how much fuel do you burn per seat during each flight. The lower this ratio is, the better it can sell it's airplanes against it's competitors like Airbus. Much of what I learned while I was there was the design of aircraft systems that would not only be safe, but fit into and aerodynamic envelope, and be light enought to be a good value proposition to Boeing and it's customers.

Barrett Technology

Barrett Technology is a leader in backdriveable and human interaction robotic arms. During my time there, I helped them create a new piece of testing equipment. Working with two other talented interns, we created a device which cut their drivetrain testing times down from 5 weeks in some cases, to a matter of hours. This device was used to stretch their steel drive cables over pulleys and fatigue them to failure. As these cables are their main driveline component and the first things to break on their arms, they are constantly improving by finding new cable types and testing different cases. Our device improved their previous version by increasing both the power and efficiency such that it was 20 times more effective in many cases.

Tesla Motors

Tesla Motors is a Palo Alto, California based company known for its high end electric vehicles. When I started, Tesla had only released the Tesla Roadster to 2500 dedicated electric vehicle enthusiasts, was supporting a variety of other manufacurers like Toyota and Daimler with their electric projects, and putting the finishing touches on the Model S. My time there was spent working on a variety of projects for the Battery engineering team. My contributions include hardware longevity testing, part design, and battery pack research and development.

Olin College

I attend Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. Located a few miles west of Boston in the small town of Needham, Olin accepts only 85 students every year, making this one of the most selective schools in the nation. Beyond that, their revolutionary style of education with focus on project based learning and entrepreneurial thinking makes the education here a unique and fascinating experience.

Design of Energy Systems: Team Kean

Design of Energy Systems is a team and project based course which started with five week long labs. During this time I was part of Team KEAN (our members' initials). All of our work on wind turbines, solar cells, hybrid technology and even steam engines is available on this Google Site made for the class. I was considering porting all five of our labs over to this site, but then decided I had better uses for several of my hours. Each project was interesting in it's own way, but this site is really only relevant to an outside viewer interested in my procedural testing experience.