Hackathon & Makeathon Projects
Hackathon & Makeathon Projects
This page showcases the projects that I have completed while working on teams participating in various hackathons and makeathons in the Boston area.
PROJECT 1: MakeHarvard 2018 — Solar-Heated, Sun-Tracking Water Purification Device
At the MakeHarvard Makeathon in February 2018, I worked with a team of freshman engineers to design a passive water purification system, with an optional active sun-tracking module. I designed and built the project hardware, except for a wooden mounting disk.
My passive module hardware consisted of a central transparent plastic chamber that enclosed a second black metal chamber that could be filled with unpurified water. The black metal chamber absorbed UV radiation and heated the water inside to boiling point. The transparent plastic chamber served to increase the heating experienced by the water, as the still air decreased convective loss and the plastic provided a greenhouse effect. Rubber tubing was directed up from the metal chamber to a higher point and the coiled down to a dish. This chamber was mounted at the focal point of a hyperbolic mirror, which directed solar radiation directly toward the chamber. The hyperbolic mirror was a sheet of mylar affixed to construction paper backing, mounted on laser-cut hyperbolic mounts. The entire apparatus was then mounted on a 2-axis manually pivoting foundation secured by a tensioned string and laser-cut acrylic gears. The governing principle of the device was that the unpurified water would boil in the metal chamber due to the solar heating and then evaporate into steam which would flow up into the tubing. At this point, the steam would condense back into purified water - as per the effects of boiling and evaporation.
The active module consisted of the above system paired with servos turning the gears. The servos were run by MatLab code that directed the servos to follow maximum light as defined by several photoresistors mounted on the device. I worked with the other team members to integrate the photoresistors and accompanying code.
PROJECT 2: MakeHarvard 2019 — 3-Axis Chaotic Motion Salad Spinner
At the second year of the MakeHarvard Makeathon, which took place in February 2019, I worked with a team that consisted of myself, two mechanical engineering majors, and a computer science major. Our goal was to develop a rotational machine that would produce semi-random, or chaotic, motion in three axes. The inspiration was a problem faced by many students with dining halls: how to evenly coat a salad with dressing? Usually, students would manually shake the salad around in at attempt to spread the dressing throughout the dish; our solution standardizes the process while providing consistent and full coating of every component of the salad.
Our design revolved around a set of three rings, each of which were mounted on an axis (x, y, or z) and connected to each other with 3D printed couplers that housed ball bearings. Sets of two housings were designed for each ring and each was slightly different, in response to the differing requirements of each ring (for example, the outermost housings had to interface with the motor and frame while the innermost housings had to support the central chamber). One of the mechanical engineers and I split the housing design between us, which allowed for me to design, CAD, and 3D print crucial housing as well as an interface between the motor and outmost ring.
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​We decided that we it was unnecessary to power every ring with a motor and instead added counterweights to the two innermost rings. These inners rings were then free to rotate within their own axes when driven by a single motor mounted between the outermost ring and the stationary frame, similar to the gyroscopic training rig used by astronauts. The end result was an Arduino powered machine that produced chaotic spinning motion in three axes within the central chamber.
PROJECT 3: Polyhack 2017 — Expo-Marker Digitizer
At the Tufts PolyHack hackathon in October 2017, I worked with a team of freshman engineering students to develop a device that could be attached to whiteboard expo markers to record whatever was written with the marker. The marker was seated within a 3D printed case that contained an accelerometer. The accelerometer was linked to an Arduino which transferred the accelerometer data to a the MatLab program. Personally, I worked with another student on writing the MatLab code that took the CSV accelerometer data and plotted the result, thereby providing a data file with a digital version of the inscribed writing. The program primarily involved running through the data and double integrating to achieve the position of the marker and then graphing the result. However, the data proved to be too noisy to achieve legible inscription. In retrospect, a Kalman filter could have been used to clean up the data.
