Projects

This is a showcase of my skills, creativity, and experience.

PRAXIS II Cat Sighting Website

One Pager Summarizing Our Design
(Designed by the whole team)

The Project

Praxis II showcase is an accumulation of a semester's worth of engineering design where teams showcase their engineering solution for the Request for Proposals (RFP) and community they were assigned to.

In PRAXIS II, I partnered with Daphne Baron, Simona Liu, and Ted Yoo to design a solution to streamline Annex Cat Rescue’s effort to help community cats in the Greater Toronto Area.

The Opportunity

The objective of the design is to increase efficiency in ACR's efforts to aid community cats, as well as to support trappers by minimizing the need for unnecessary trips, such as those where no cats are caught.

How We Divereged

The original RFP we received was heavily focused on a physical design or alteration of cages that ACR uses in their effort. However, after careful framing and many group discussions, we decided to go for a software solution instead. This decision was heavily influenced by the values that my team and I shared. We knew that a software solution would be harder to test compared to a physical solution and we would also need to construct a brand-new requirement model to evaluate and justify our solution. We chose to do additional work because we value challenges as a team and find the learning opportunity rewarding. Aside from our values, we knew that a website design would have a long-lasting impact and higher scalability compared to a hardware design.

Resulting Product

In the end, we designed a website that employs crowdsourcing to accurately map out the location of community cats and their colonies in the GTA. Our website enables anyone with internet access to report community cat sightings, which helps to gather critical data. By utilizing a gradient map generator developed through MATLAB, we can clearly display locations with high population density, making it easier for cat trappers to locate colonies. This feature provides a convenient and effective tool for managing community cat populations in the GTA.

The UI That Allows Anyone to Report A Sighting
(designed by myself)

Gradient Map Generator That Creates Heat Map Base Off Data Collected (Designed by Daphne)

Group Photo After Praxis Showcase

CIV102 Beam Design

Final Product (constructed by the whole team)

Drawings of Beam Cross Section
(drawn by Klara)

Post-test Picture With Prof. Evan Bentz and TA Raymond Ma

The Final Dimension of Our Beam (drawn by Klara)

The Project

Partnered with Alia Djebali, Chenny Jiang, and Klara Meng, the CIV102 design challenge required each group to construct a 1.5 meters matboard bridge with the constraint on material usage (one mat-board per group).

Throughout the designing process, I used technical skills such as Python and MATLAB to calculate and maximize the allowable load by changing the cross-section of our bridge with the limited material.

Problems We Faced

Due to some planning error, my group faced a problem with not having enough material to finish the base of the bridge.
We perceived the problem at hand as without a base, our cross-section will significantly weaken.
However, because of my knowledge of scientific principles and experience with problem-solving in CIV102, I interpreted this problem as an opportunity to better optimize the materials used for our bridge.
I figured that if we have a base where tensile stress would be the highest, our bridge will still perform fine. This interpretation as well as my willingness to take risks led me to recommend having a base on only one side of the bridge where construction quality was the weakest. The reason for taking this risk is that I believed risk-taking with the purpose of success encourages personal growth.

Design Drawings (drawn by Klara)

Resulting Product

With a theoretical failure load of 1090N, our bridge performed the best in our tutorial group, supporting over 850N of dynamic load in testing. The product of our design experience provided me with validation for the decision I made for my team, and from this, I receive the satisfaction of personal growth that engineering design provides.

IMG_2687.MOV

Beam failing at 1kN

IMG_2675.MOV

Prof. Bentz Jokes About Our One Sided Base

PRAXIS I Morning Alarm Alternative

Early Sketch of Our Design (drawn by myself)

The Project

Praxis I design report is an acumination of a semester's worth of engineering design where teams spend the second half of the course applying the materials taught throughout the first half of the course on designing and recommending a solution. In PRAXIS I, I was partnered with Nathan Chin and Cheryl Yue, and we came up with a solution to eliminate morning alarm disturbances.

The opportunity

Most roommates do not have the same sleeping schedule here at UofT; having an alarm that fits one roommate's schedule could also disturb the other. From research conducted among UofT students, it was found that alarms also pose a disturbance for the majority of the sample population. Further, over half of the students are affected daily. Poor or inadequate sleep is problematic as it can cause irritability and stress which can greatly hinder the life of those students.

Our Solution

Our proposed solution, called the Bed Dropper, is designed to wake up the user by simulating the sensation of falling. This idea is based on the natural response triggered by entering a state of free fall, which causes an increase in heart rate and can wake a person up. The Dropping Bed involves securing the bed's legs into two synchronized pneumatic cylinders, each with a height of 12 cm and a radius of 4 cm, which can raise and lower the bed. Prior to the alarm triggering, the bed's legs will be elevated to a specific height, and at the designated time, the cylinders will rapidly lower the bed by 10 cm. This sudden drop will create a sensation of free fall, but it will be gradually dampened towards the end of the fall.

Discussing our solution with our studio instructor

Early-stage prototype to get our idea across
(prototype by Nathan)

PHY180 Pendulum Labs

The Product Pendulum We Used for Data Collect
(assembled by Jim and myself)

The Project

The PHY180 pendulum lab is a research/design assignment that requires students to design and make alterations to a pendulum based on the experiments that you run throughout the 3-month course. In this assignment, I partnered with Jim Jin to design, modify and experiment on a pendulum to collect critical data to generate the necessary models for our lab report.

What I did

Throughout the design process, I utilized my understanding of physics principles such as the fundamentals of dampened oscillatory motion to analyze and modify our initial pendulum design to minimize data uncertainty while making measurement more convenient.

The Problem

One of the more problematic issues we ran into while taking measures from the pendulum was with our tracking instrument. To collect pendulum position with respect to time we utilized a video analysis software called Tracker, however, because of the limitation of Tracker’s built-in image recognition, we had to manually plot the points onto the software which was extremely inefficient.

Our Solution

To solve that problem, we experimented with many different colours and backgrounds to create a stronger contrast so the built-in image recognition can collect data automatically. With the constraint of materials limited to only household items, we created a pendulum using a necklace chain holding a circular weight. As a modification, we had green paper taped to the camera-facing side of the circular weight and provided it with a black background to create the contrast we needed. This allowed us to run more trials of error as it made taking measurements more convenient. In the end, we were able to collect the data and mathematical models that support the relationship described by the theoretical model.

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