This is VfOx, a sensor designed to fly on the DAVINCI Venus mission lauching in the late 2020s. In the spring of 2024, I got to work with 20+ other students, as well as industry professionals from NASA Goddard Space Center, APL, and others,  to further progress on its development and solve problems as they came up. 

One of my major contributions was my final project. With 4 other students, we developed an extensive testing and validation procedure to ensure that the VfOx could hold up to the loads and conditions laid out in the NASA documentation we were given. We designed tests for both launch and entry vibration, and thermal conditions during entry and space transit, as well as proposing a "thermal testing unit" to allow for vibration testing to be done at a larger assembly level while still fitting in smaller thermal vacuum chambers.

I learned quite a bit about documentation and requirements during this class.  Seeing how extensive the NASA documentation is was crazy, and the thoroughness to make sure that everyone knew the conditions expected and requirements at every level of the probe was even crazier

In the fall of my freshman year, I took a freshman mechanical engineering lab. A large part of this course was a design project. The challenge was to come up with a device that drives across a cable as fast as possible using only energy generated by a falling water bottle. At the end of the semester, the department came together for a bracket-style competition to determine which device was the best.

This was a fun challenge, and I worked with 2 other students to design and build the device to the left. It used a a string wrapped around a pulley that spun as the bottle fell to drive a belt to drive a wheel, moving across the cable. Overall, it worked quite well, and we made it to the semifinals, with one of the most reliable devices of any team. The entire assembly was made using laser cut parts to allow for quick manufacturing and iteration, which was very useful with the amount of parts that needed tuning to perform best. 

I learned a lot about small iterations on design to maximize performance during this project. For example, the input pulley had its diameter changed over ten times to get as much energy out of the falling bottle as possible.

In the spring of my freshman year, I took the second half of a freshman mechanical engineering lab. It had a design project component, as in the fall, but this time it was not a competition. I worked with 3 teammates to design and build an arcade game visually inspired by Grant Wood's “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” and functionally inspired by the Chrome Dinosaur Game, it had the player control Paul Revere to jump and duck to avoid bushes, British soldiers, and birds.

The project was Arduino based, and used a servo and linkage to actuate Paul; with motors and ring gears to move the obstacles. it also featured 4 limit switches, a button, speaker, and ultrasonic distance sensor to monitor user input and the state of the game. This was necessary because of presence of two rings rotating at different speeds. While it allowed for several minutes of play before patterns were repeated, it also meant that we had to track collisions with sensors instead of dead reckoning in software, which increased complexity significantly

During this project, I learned a lot about scope creep. While we ended up with one of the more fun games at the end of the semester, the effort that went into it from all of us was quite high, and likely could have been avoided with some strategic downscoping or choosing a simpler project at the start of the semester.