This page is not particularly pretty at the moment. I will fix that later, when I have more time.

Paper Drawings

Lost in a catastrophic incident, similar in caliber to events such as the theft of the Mona Lisa, or The Concert, these images and their originals have been lost to time. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that they were quite possibly the most incredible, artistic, influential, and incredible again drawings to ever bless the eyes of man. (On a serious note, all of these assignments were completed and marked, but images and originals have all been lost.)

Gravity Car

Assignment: Build a car capable of converting as much gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy as possible.

My design: I used pizza cutters as wheels, and a cardboard box as the frame to reduce weight. The design was thin in order to reduce air resistance.

This is the only evidence I have of this car ever existing, as it was promptly ripped to shreds by my group members immediately afterward, for no reason at all.

Cardboard boat

Assignment: Design a boat out of cardboard, capable of remaining in the water as long as possible

My design: we started by scoring the cardboard lengthwise, and bending it into a semi-octagon. we attached some half-octagon shaped cardboard to the sides, and then cut many long, thin strips, as well as shorter ones. We laid out the long ones lengthwise on the inside, and the short ones widthwise. This set up a “skeleton” of sorts to provide some structure and support for the “floor” we put in. We waterproofed it by completely covering everything with tape.

It went horribly.

Voyage of the Titanic 2

I think we had the potential to build in incredible boat in this project, and to our credit, the boat’s floor and hull remained intact and waterproof until completely submerged, but our design’s folly was a simple oversight: When given the option to, things that I build tend to not work. The weight of a person (concentrated onto the area they were sitting on) was enough to taco-shell the whole boat and lead to the eventual sinking of the boat. Despite the incredible spectacle of the boat’s plunge, we didn’t even manage to win “Spectacular Sinkage”.

CLE Project

Assignment: Build a project pertaining to a chosen career.

My design: I chose machine learning engineer, and build an AI to differentiate between bees and monkeys. My thought process was that bees and monkeys were pretty different, so it would be pretty easy for the bot to find the differences. I was wrong.

the presentation

Lit Launchers

Assignment: Create a launcher capable shooting an object into a target from a distance.

My design: After multiple iterations of relatively boring ideas, I decided to come up with the goofiest way I could approach this problem. I present: The spooner

The plan is to encase on this in a shell and just feed ammunition into it and have the spooner just launch it. I am designing it in blender.

the spooner

Final product:

Function:

Not that great. I ended up designing some other parts of the spooner in Fusion 360, my first foray into the software, and while better than blender, I am not particularly fond of Fusion either. The spooner faced major problems due to the nature of it’s design. It required a TON of current to power sufficiently, and even that could generally not overcome static friction, and would require a manual spin up, in order to bring it to speed. This, of course, is not where the problems ended for me. If you place the marble into the spooner before it reaches top speed, it will shoot in the correct direction, but will not shoot very fast. If you place it in after it reaches top speed, it will be flung incredibly fast, but in a seemingly random (usually undesirable) direction. The more you control the speed of the marble, the less you can control it’s direction, and vice versa. I call it the spooner uncertainty principle.

Ping-Pong Pickup

Design: The primary idea behind my design was to minimize point loss. I used mostly string, which was incredibly cheap. The device was a small paper tube, with two strings attached to the sides. My contraption worked as follows:

1. Throw catcher behind ball (do not let go of string leads)
2. Pull catcher close to ball
3. Cross strings and pull upwards to create a sort of ramp to grab the ball and funnel it directly into the catcher
4. Uncross string, and rip leads apart as violently as possible; Because the string are secured to the catcher tube, pulling the leads of the device apart has the effect of pinching the ball within the tube. To release, relax the leads once past the line.

The idea worked very very well. Getting the ball into the tube worked incredibly well, the pulling apart of the leads not only very effectively brought the carriage tube over the line quickly, but also did in fact pinch the ball within the tube to prevent it from dropping until it was past the line. Small oversight: the length of base of a triangle with some angle increases as the distance from the base to the tip increases. What this means for me is that in order to effectively rip the leads apart at long distances, I would need an incredible wingspan. And seeing as wingspan is directly related to height, and I am essentially a hobbit, my design did not work well for me for distances a little over a meter. A really tall person could have operated this device very efficiently, I think. Overall, I scored an 88.

Ongoing Capstone Passion project

My project this year is a continuation of my project from last year, The Arm, a mechanical arm I am building with Luca. This year, we are 3d printing parts, using real motors, doing better math, and experimenting with all new kinds of methods. I am working on writing another, hopefully less confusing, report on the mathematical working of The Arm. As soon as it is done, it will be uploaded here. This time, we are using 3 arm segments, so the triangle approach doesn’t work the same. So, I have redesigned the system to use circles as the basis instead.

I have loved doing this project, because it has allowed me to experiment with many many many different mathematical techniques and approaches to this problem. I have a whole notebook filled with solutions to this problem that either did not work or were to complicated to implement (or in one case, too complicated to explain, because I still want the solution to be comprehensible). I plan on showcasing some of the notebook at the STEAM Fair.