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joy quotes

Joy’s Quotes #16

[237-242] The engineers were very kind, and I learned a lot from them. And I’m more confident in my ability to go through the engineering process of, “We have a need. How do we solve that need,” and how to get from Step A to B to C and finally putting it on the machine. Because it was a small company, I was able to actually see the very start all the way to actually shipping it out on the unit that the customer was going to use.

[137-152] Then, at the end of the internship, I worked on modifying one of their vehicles that they had to accommodate a fifth wheel. So, I researched what kind of fifth wheel we would want. And a fifth wheel is something that’s on the back of a trailer, or, sorry, on the back of a semi that the trailer hooks into. So, it has the kingpin from the trailer that goes in, and it latches into the fifth wheel. And that’s what allows a trailer to rotate on the back of a semi. I worked on that, changing one of their pre-made units that they keep in-house, and they don’t sell, to be able to have a fifth wheel that they can then haul their semi-trailer with. Because, they need to use that trailer in order to haul some of the units that they are shipping to the companies. Cause, right now, we ask our trucking company to come and take our vehicles. Cause, you can’t ship these things on a plane. They are way too heavy. So, we hire a company to pick up the unit and drive it to the west coast. But we would like to use our own trailer from now on. Then, when we’re moving stuff around our plant, it’s nice to have our own way to move our unit from one end to the other without having to drive it from down the property

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joy quotes

Joy’s Quotes #29

[356-381] I’m also working on my junior project. In this class, there’s four sub teams now. There’s the printheads, so they’re in charge of mixing sulfur and sand into a 3D printable material, so highly chemistry related. I am not on that team. And then the fine positioning system, which is in charge of what you would think of when you see a 3D printer, it’s the three axes that move the printhead. And then another team is in charge of the course positioning system. We don’t know if it will be four wheels, but four wheeled structure that the printhead will then be on. The printhead can travel across the bar at the top, and basically, it just drives. And then another team is in charge of the GPS locationing system, because we need to know where we are within the world plane.

So I’m on the spine positioning system, so I’m in charge of the three axes that this printhead is going to move in. And on my sub team, my specific role is the structural integrity. I’m in charge of belts, screws in the actual structure. thankfully for me, that makes it really easy to move online, because I can use SOLIDWORKS or Autodesk Inventor to model this. And they have built in stress and thermal testing and all of that stuff, so that’s really good. I’m not sure the other people are going to test their stuff. We’re still working on a way to integrate all of it, because there’s something called LTspice, which can model circuits. So, the electrical engineer on our sub team, he can model the circuits, but I’m not sure how we’re going to model communication between sub teams. So, fine positioning system communicating the pretense location with the course positioning system within the planet’s surface. So, that’s something we’re going to figure out when we get there.

[411-417] Overall, junior project is going well. We have Zoom meetings in place of our lecture meetings, which usually lasts 15 minutes. I meet with my sub team in a Zoom meeting on Wednesdays. And I meet with the full class and all the professors on Mondays to get a plan for that week and for all of the professors to be aware of what’s going on. And then throughout the week. It’s only week two but so far each person has been working on their own and then we’re communicating with the group meet or Zoom, if we have problems within our sub team and we need to communicate that.

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lauren quotes

Lauren’s Quotes #1

[137-142; 152-157] My first semester, I didn’t have many engineering classes. It was mostly like math and general education courses, but I did have to take a class called ‘Engineering 101’ and they taught us free-body diagrams and force equals mass times acceleration. It was more physics than engineering, but we had recitation classes every week where we would apply the physics to real-world stuff, at least try to. Sometimes the projects were a little sad. When we were learning about momentum, we would stack two golf balls on top of each other and drop them on the ground. At the end of the first semester, we had a project where we designed a puck launcher where we had to launch the puck across the table. You scored points based on where the puck landed on the table.

[143-149; 158-161; 165-170; 172-173] During the second semester, I took ‘Engineering 102’ where we did more stuff with circuits and harmonic motions. We were given a problem and we had to design a solution to that problem. For that one, my group got the assignment of a STEM toy. Make it so that kids enjoy learning STEM. My group made a basketball launcher game, like a tabletop basketball. You had to figure out what angle you’re throwing the ball at and what force. We chose to design a basketball launcher since it seemed to be the easiest thing that we could come up with based on the time we could all work on the project together. There were four of us to the group, but we didn’t really know each other beforehand, so we weren’t good friends and they just randomly assigned us. Our schedules didn’t match up all that well, so we only had class time to work on the project. I didn’t have as much fun as my senior thesis, but we got it done and we made a marketing video for it. We presented it to the class, and we got a good grade I also had my first mechanical engineering class in the second semester. I took a statics course that focused on free body diagrams. I still talk with some of the professors when I see them in the hall. In some instances, I would ask them how they were doing. Even though the ‘Engineering 102’ class was huge, 600 people, the professors still recognized me, and it was really cool.

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