A PDF version of the patent: US9445644
I hold this patent with five other girls on our footwear with sliding cap design. Our original shoe design was created to help aid the elderly and those with disabilities with putting on their shoes. The sliding shoe cap design allows for the shoe to be securely closed with a simple tap against a hard surface, eradicating the need to bend over to put on shoes.
One special part of the Fundamentals of Engineering Honors course at Ohio State is that at the beginning of the second semester you get revealed a robot course and for the next few months you work with a team of four to design, program, build, and wire a functioning autonomous robot within monetary and time constraints. My team was comprised of 2 computer science students and 2 mechanical engineering students (including myself) we called ourselves team TACO, combining the first letter of all of our last names. I took on the role as the mechanical lead and spent numerous hours in the shop drilling holes, sawing, gluing, and sometimes duct taping things together to help construct our robot. On our robot we utilized Iguan wheel motors in tandem with various servo motors to operate our arms. To control our robot we used an Ohio State specific Proteus which is similar to an Arduino and were able to use encoders built into our wheels along with a QR code reading system provided by the FEH teaching staff. Our robot went through many design phases and one of our main problems throughout the process was weight distribution and wheel slippage. To help with this, I designed and 3D printed a back skid for our robot, we added rubber bands to our wheels, and we worked on motor placement to get a more even distribution of weight. I also worked on creating the 3D model of our final robot design in Solidworks. On top of physically designing our robot, our team spent endless hours in open lab testing code and running our robot on the course to get everything just right. It was a time consuming project to say the least, but luckily I had a great group to work with and together we worked hard while still having fun! In the individual competition we ended up being #3 out of all the teams making us a first seed team heading into the final competition. In the final competition we had a perfect run, but unfortunately did not make it to the final four. We were still proud of ourselves and all we had accomplished over the semester. We had a lot of failures and we had a lot of successes throughout the semester, but we were able to grow as a team and gain a lot of practical engineering skills. Overall, it was a great experience I will never forget!
Click this link to read about the competition (you may see a familiar face): 25th Annual Robot Competition Article
When you hear the word hackathon you think of a bunch of computer loving nerds sitting in a dark room typing away on some complex piece of code. Well this is at least what I envisioned when I first heard of a hackathon. Although I had no idea what a hackathon actually was, when my friend asked me to join her hackathon team, I thought, why not! I’ve always loved to code for fun and recently I’ve been wanting to learn to code an app, but never found time to teach myself. However, when I found out that a hackathon actually is a 24 hour coding extravaganza where you and your team work on a coding project nonstop for 24 hours straight, I figured it would be the perfect time to build my first app. To prepare for the hack a thon I went to a short seminar on campus led by Apple on building basic apps. This gave me a beginning understanding of the app making process. Showing up to the hackathon, our team had no idea what we were going to code or even what to expect, but we soon got to work and eventually decided on coding a polynomial root calculator app/game. Our idea was to not only calculate the root of a polynomial, but to also help kids learn how to calculate these roots. So, for around 24 hours straight we worked to code the calculator/game in java on eclipse and then using swift code programmed our ios app. This was all of our team’s first time coding in swift and building an app so it was a huge learning curve. We spent many hours looking at manuals and youtube videos trying to teach ourselves swift code, building our app slowly but surely. In the end, we created a functioning root calculator app, an educational game on java, and a final website for our project. We didn’t win the competition with our idea, but overall I was just glad to finally sit down and learn how to code an app. I can officially call myself an app developer which I think is way cooler than any award we could’ve won.
Our Website: https://parabolicparadise.weebly.com/
The first semester of our fundamentals of engineering course, we are required to work with a partner to develop a game for use on the Ohio State Proteus system (similar to an Arduino). My partner and I over the course of a few weeks designed a Simon game where a pattern is displayed and the user must tap back the pattern on the screen. The pattern continues to grow until the user forgets the pattern and taps the wrong block, ending the game. As part of our game we had different levels of play where the pattern would be displayed progressively faster as the game continued and we had a statistics section that kept track of the high scores for the game.
Our final code: Final_Software_Design_Code
