Graduate School Work at
NCSU
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I attended the Integrated Manufacturing Systems
Engineering Institute (IMSEI)
at NCSU. This program has 3 Master's Degree concentrations.
Manufacturing,
Logistics, and Mechatronics. I studied Mechatronics and graduated with
a Masters Degree in Integrated Manufacturing Systems Engineering with a
Mechatronics Concentration. Here are some of the
projects that I worked on while pursuing my masters degree.
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This is a project that I worked on in a mechatronics
design course. The objective of the course was to build a
car that could identify an opponent, tag the opponent,
and leave the operating arena by exiting the same side
that the vehicle entered on. The car that my team designed and
built used a polaroid sonar to identify the opponent. A
bump sensor to know when we had tagged the opponent, a
digital compass to allow us to enter and exit on the same
side, and a Motorola 68HC11 to control the vehicle. Our
car won the competition.
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This is a pick and place robot arm that I did for a
class project. I was given the robot arm with several
stepper motors missing, and no control unit. I installed
new stepper motors and hardware to make the arm
mechanically sound, and then I built the control unit on
the right. I used a Parallax Basic Stamp to
control the robot arm. The arm could be moved by input
from a keyboard, or it could execute any one of several programs. The arm was used to pick up
graphit motor brushes off of a rotary table and load them in a brush
welding machine.
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| This is an "ROV In A Jar". I built it as a
proof of concept that I could implement a two wire two
way serial communication protocal to talk to an ROV from
a control pad. This was a precursor to the ROV that I
built for the National Undersea Research Center (NURC). The ROV's
electronics are housed in an empty plastic jelly jar. It has 4 motors
and an electromagnet to pick things up. The ROV contains
a basic stamp, and the control box contains a motorola
68HC16 microprocessor. They talk to each other over a 2
wire RS-232 connection. |
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is the ROV that I built for the National Undersea Reseach Center in
Wilmington NC, (which is now the UNC Wilmington Undersea Vehicles Program). The project started when NURC was donated an RCV-225.
NURC contacted NCSU to see if any mechatronics students could
make a semester project out of converting RCV-225 parts into a new
working ROV. I assembled a team of friends and classmates and we did it. |
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| This is a project that Ryan
Johnson and I worked on under the guidance of Dr. Joe David for
Michelin Tires. The project was to measure the effect of
slip angle on rolling resistance. When a car corners, the
car doesn't actually go the direction that the rim is
pointed because the tire deforms. This deformation
consumes energy, and has a tendency to slow the vehicle
down. We did tests to measure how fast a car slowed down
for given turning angles. We used an on board data
acquisition system on NC State's Legends race car. We equipped
one of the tie rods with a linear pot to know what the
steering angle was. We went to Michelin in Greenville SC
and presented our findings. |
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