I started competitive robotics when I was in 6th grade, and continued to compete up until I graduated from high school. For 4 of those years, I was team captain, and one year our team was top 200 in the world out of 4,100. From VEX I learned a great deal about how to lead a small team of engineers to work together on designing, building, coding, testing, and competing with a robot.
For my senior year capstone project in highschool, our team decided to upgrade the blinds in our classroom by motorizing them and connecting them to a controller so they can be lowered quickly. We wanted to do this because classrooms at my school many windows, such as room 306, pose a security risk to the 600+ students and staff when there is a lockdown because it takes a significant amount of time to lower the blinds. I was in charge of designing the mechanical aspects of the device and using CAD software to model and print our parts.
3D view of one of my designs. Use your mouse to zoom and rotate.
Over the summer of 2023 I got the opportunity to intern for Scarlett Inc. in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There I was in charge of Maintaining, troubleshooting, and operating their Ultimaker S5 3D printer and Figure Four Standalone resin printer. I also used CAD software to model and set up prints for customers.
In January I was challenged to make a sorting machine that would sort objects by two categories: size and color. In three short weeks we designed and built a machine from limited resources that would sort small wooden balls by two sizes and three colors. We did all the CADing, building, soldering, wiring, and programming ourselves for this project.
