High School and Before

FTC Robotics

I was part of the Hempfield FTC Robotics team for three years and the team captain for two. Every year we had to create a robot to compete in a new challenge. My final year, we broke away from the FTC organization and decided to have an internal competition as we found that the FTC environment was difficult for new teams to thrive in.

Paper Plane Factory

The Problem:

For my Computer Integrated Manufacturing class, we needed to develop a final project that we could open to the community on the bi-annual battle bot competition.

The Solution:

We decided to create a paper plane factory. The machine dispensed paper with directions to fold a plane printed on the sheet. After the plane was folded, it was fed into the inspection area where the system scanned dark locations on the plane and would reject the plane if it wasn't folded properly. A series of robotic arms communicating with opto-isolators moved the plane to a remote-controlled turret that could be aimed at a series of targets. A remote-controlled car with an arm could then be used to retrieve the plane. A video of the process is shown below.

My Contribution:

I was responsible for the paper dispenser. Dispensing one sheet of paper from a stack consistently is much more difficult than it sounds. Unprinted paper behaves differently from printed paper. I ended up using a paper tray from an old printer to finally get the dispenser to work. I also modified the original claw rover to have a worm drive with limit switches as the original geared design would fall under its own weight once power was removed.

Racing Drone

I built a FPV racing drone from individual components. I unfortunately only flew it a few times before it bounced into the street and got crushed by a truck. In the process of building it, I got to learn about tuning PID systems and improved my soldering skills.

Lego Mindstorms

Starting around middle school, I built and coded countless programs with Lego Mindstorms from bionic arms, to remote control tanks, to card shufflers. Lego Mindstorms introduced me to text-based coding when the included graphical interface couldn't handle the complexity of the programs I was feeding it. Lego Mindstorms taught me how to use accelerometers, limit switches, light sensors, servo motors, and Bluetooth to create robots and machines to do what I wanted.