MEET THE TEAM!

We're a team of 5 sophomores from Olin College of Engineering in a class called Principles of Engineering. We bonded together over a love of digging ourselves deep graves and Coconut Thai. Three of our five had prior experience with being musically talented, and the other two can now successfully tell a snare drum from a high hat!

GRETCHEN RICE

Gretchen is our resident Robotics Engineer, class of 2020, who worked mainly on code and integration throughout this project. At the start of the project she said that her learning goals included doing more complex programing and heavy integration! Now that the robot is built, Gretchen is happy to say that she was able to learn a lot of new coding things. Not only that, but  the integration on this project was crazy and she’s glad she got to be a part of it! Something she learned in the project is that incremental, version programming is super useful. It’s really nice to be able to look at code you wrote 2 weeks ago and have it be untouched and still there to learn from. Outside of POE you can find Gretchen building autonomous aquatic robots and singing in the school’s a capella group.

ELENA MEYERSON

Elena is a sophomore at Olin studying Mechanical Engineering. Her learning goals for this project included things like learning more about different fabrication methods, practicing iterative mechanical design, and learning how to document a large scale project. Elena came into this project knowing nothing about drums or really music of any kind, but can now pick out the sound of a kick drum from basically any song she hears.

EMMA WESTERHOFF

Emma is a sophomore studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. She wanted to get more experience with circuit design, firmware, and designing for mechanical systems. Her primary motivation for working on this project was frustration with finding reliable drummers. 

COLVIN CHAPMAN

Colvin is a sophomore studying Mechanical Engineering, and is kind of a machine shop junkie. He was interested in developing his mechanical linkage design skills. He likes metal more than any other material, but dislikes metal more than any other genre of music. He is the sole reason we have waterjet parts on our project. Colvin also enjoys hitting drums (although he's better at trombone) and making drum sounds with his face in the Olin a-Capella group called The PowerChords.

SAMANTHA YOUNG

Emma is a sophomore studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was excited to do circuit design, signal processing, and mechanical integration.  She really enjoyed working on a full scale robotics project. Samantha was also excited to learn more about music and hone her non existent drumming skills.