Arwen is an electrical and computer engineering major, an amateur artist and performer, and a board game enthusiast. They are inspired by House on the Rock in Spring Green WI, Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, and most cryptids. They have experience working with signal processing, writing code, and working with RF modules, and they’re eager to learn more about mechanical integration!
Arwen’s goals for this project were to learn more about user experience design, circuit design, sound processing, and mechanical integration. They learned a lot about how to design an experience within technical constraints, and learned about circuit and sound design by building a tone-generating oscillator that could make sounds at different pitches. They also learned about the importance of identifying risks early on, how to document a project well, and how to quickly pivot to new methods when things aren’t working.
Katie is a mechanical engineering major, with interests in UX design and Human Factors in medical devices. She has experience with CAD and shop tools. In her free time she loves playing piano, cooking, and spending time with friends and family.
Some of her goals for this project was to work with changing movement from rotational to linear, or vice versa. She also wanted to focus on building her designing with integration in mind and fabricating skills.
Upon completion of the project, Katie was able to learn a variety of concepts. The biggest being integration and mounting. She found how important it was to make sure she kept integration in mind while creating the initial designs. She also realized that mounting could turn out a whole variety of ways, especially if she leaves too many degrees of freedom. Katie also now has a better understanding of certain electrical concepts and techniques for creating circuits. Apart from the technical aspects she learned, she also gained experience in delegating tasks and asking for help from others who might not have much mechanical experience.
Thomas is studying electrical and computer engineering. He has experience with circuitry and electrical design. In his free-time, he enjoys sailing, skiing, and rowing.
During this project, his personal learning goals included analog circuit design, system integration, and the scrum project management style. For this project, he learned about analog circuitry by working on the ADSR circuitry, oscillators that generate tones, and on the PCB that integrated the circuity. Other takeaways he had included learning audio signal processing strategies, how to work on a larger-scale project under the scrum framework, iterative design, the importance of documentation and how to do it well, and real time innovative problem solving with overlooked challenges we discovered throughout the process. One of his biggest takeaways about the engineering process was identifying the major risk factors continuously throughout the process and trying to alleviate them with various tests or engineering solutions as quickly as possible.
Dhara is an electrical and computer engineering major with a passion for space-level design. Coming into this project, she had three main learning goals: digital and analog sound, mechanical integration, and user-experience. Her biggest contributions to this project were in sound processing, user-experience, website, and embedded programming. Dhara’s biggest takeaway is that a team can make or break the project. This was her best teaming experience thus far because everyone was passionate about the product and whole-heartedly wanted to learn and grow.
When she’s not working on class projects, you can find her reading Ray Bradbury, on a walk, or listening to R&B! She also enjoys developing new skills like knitting, handstands, languages, embroidery, logo design, and who knows what’s next!
Dhara hopes to continue improving her skills in embedded programming and circuit design in aerospace. Why aerospace? Dhara has always been fascinated by space. In fact, her favorite book is The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury - a collection of short stories about life on Mars. If there is anything that can fix a bad day, it’s staring up into a clear, dark sky speckled with bright stars.
Annie is an electrical and computer engineering major with what the kids call a passion for media arts. When she’s not busy integrating and calibrating circuitry, she has a fresh and funky time trying to outbid people on eBay for Earth, Wind & Fire vinyl just so she can listen to Boogie Wonderland on repeat for copious amounts of time. When her less-than-successful attempts fall through, she resorts to stand up comedy, bouldering, and jazz rap for enjoyment. They’re pretty okay, she guesses -- no Boogie Wonderland -- but still pretty okay.
Her personal learning goals were to learn more about systems integration, analog circuit design, and sound processing. She worked mainly on the photodiode laser detection system. For integration, Annie worked with Katie on fabrication of the overall structure and learned a ton about designing electrical systems under mechanical constraints. She additionally worked on the ADSR and tone-generating oscillators for the analog synthesizer.
