Roberto Andaya

Had to create a camera housing assembly for a design challenge. It gave design criteria such as needing to have yaw and pitch movement, IP68 protection, and work with a specific camera and lens. Some things were not specified and I had to make logical assumptions along the way.

The design put into account manufacturing, vibration, ingress protection, tolerancing, and user interfacing.

I made a 3D print mock up of the housing to simulate the fitting and see if there were any dimension or design flaws. After some small adjustments it was able to fit and properly hold the camera on one of the testing cars.

We created a smart tackling dummy for football practices. There is a lot of ambiguity on what is considered fact in football performance. Our team created a system that can detect where the dummy gets hit, how many G’s of force, and a juking mechanism underneath to further train a player.

We had to used standard prototyping techniques like laser cutting and 3D printing but more legitimate methods like using Metal CNCs, CNC Routers, and PCB Milling Machines.

Personally I created the foam system by cutting dozens of layers with a CNC router, creating a the sensor array, and designing and creating multiple PCB boards for wire management since we were dealing with almost 100 wires.

Our project ended up doing relatively well during presentations and we won 2017 Most Innovative Project for my Electromechanical Design Class. One of our teammates was looking to pursue this idea as a startup.

I created an encasement and clip system for the 3-D axis reader product, FUSE, that is used to monitor the posture of an industrial worker. It would be paired with a clip interface mechanism to attach to existing products such as the non-powered exoskeleton, FLx.

The enclosure version underwent multiple iterations for appeal and mechanical specifications by 3D printing using SLS Printers. The clip system incorporated a spring clip mechanism requiring the FUSE to be placed like a walkie-talkie clipping in.

About 150 of these enclosures were made based on my design. We had to dye the encasements and assemble them ourselves. It was gratifying seeing my design go from prototype to actual clients.

The Pickle Rick Keychain was developed as a small project to sell a figurine from the popular Rick and Morty show. I worked with a fellow engineer to design, manufacture, package, and sell the keychain with moderate success.

We 3D printed the design, paid an artist to paint the figurine, and sold the keychain on an online sales website. Many iterations of size, color, and manufacturing methods were devised to create the best product.

PLANT BUZZER & ENCLOSURE

This project was initially intended to make a timer buzzer as a long-term reminder. I could set reminders on my phone but having a buzzer next to the thing I needed reminding (plants, trash can) had its benefits. It would ring once every 10 mins once the base reminder time passed and continue to do so until reset. This way, it will keep reminding throughout the day if someone isn’t there and doesn’t get turned off as quickly as a phone alarm.

Afterward, I decided to make an enclosure to go around the electronics. I created the PCB and fabricated it myself. I used SolidWorks to design the enclosure with snap hook fasteners to clip the case together. A button cap was made to go on top of the PCB button, and in the enclosure, guide rails were attached to keep it constrained such that it could only move in one axis. I also made it so that there were standoffs for keeping the board constraint on all its axis.

The system worked pretty well. I have now gone and made an injection molding redesign to have more experience designing for manufacture. This redesign includes all the same features, except it applies draft angles (2°) and tighter tolerances. The following pictures show a draft analysis of the enclosure, showing how the green meets the 2° requirement. There are yellow sections that do not meet the 2° requirement in the analysis, but those are in regions with an undercut, so this would require a side action insert for the snap hook or a lifter for the snap groove.

I am designing it to be made of standard ABS plastic with a uniform wall thickness of 0.06”. I will be getting the design SLS printed to see how the design holds up since the quality will be around the same as injection molding. I also received a protolabs design cube that shows injection molding techniques and good practices to better understand what works.

The following is a link to a Solidworks 2017 pack-and-go file that contains the final design that was sent out to Shapeways: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18DZktmMyqtciRTscGDa40nwuDR745zwD?usp=sharing.

This project was to better my knowledge of sheet metal design since it is a vital asset in a mechanical engineers skill set. I made the box container for a friend that wanted to have a sectioned off portion in the container. Originally I was going to try and have the sectioning off by bending the sheet metal a certain way but though that it would be easier and more useful to have a bracket that goes inside to section the box. I also made hole patterns along the box so that the bracket can be adjusted in case the desired spacing ever needed to be modified.

Sheet metal bending is not cheap and I had quote half a dozen manufacturers: Emachineshop, Xometry, Fictiv, Protolabs, M&K Metals, and MetalsCut4U. Only one of them had a reasonable quote for making a one-off design. Emachineshop.com won it out with being approximately 1/3 of the price compared to its other competitors.

The parts came in and they matched what my drawing required. The angled parts were off ~1-2 degrees but acceptable for this design. I did not model the hardware that would be used to secure the bracket to the case, but I went with a 1/4'“-20 bolt and a wingnut on the other end. I wanted to make the system as simple as possible by limiting the number of hand tools needed to secure the parts. I also put a neoprene spacer in-between the bracket and the case. This way the bracket will not rotate as easily since it could rotate on an axis because of the simple bolt holes.

Overall I am very happy with this design. The manufacturer even sent me double the quantity at no cost to me, maybe some communication error, but I will take it!

I decided that I wanted to upgrade my fan necklace (a neeto product) from AA batteries to a reusable Li-ion pack. I knew that that these batteries need to be charged carefully and so I created a charging board that was also connected to the fan system for an all-in-one product.

After reading datasheets and going with the recommended components for the board, I sent the board to get manufactured at OshPark and the parts from Digikey.

The V1 board was a proof of concept to make sure I was doing everything correctly. I tried to use as little area as possbile to make a cheap board. It became hard to properly heat up and place all the components since the heat on the board would cause the opposite side to desolder as well. I also used through holes for connecting the battery and wires to the fan’s motor. This idea worked in a prototyping sense to do something quickly but it was rather annoying to solder and desolder if needed.

I came to the conclusion I needed a V2 board. This version was a single sided PCB. I wanted to make sure the bottom was evenly flush and that no soldering issues would occur. I also make the proper holes for the battery clip and a special wire clamp part for holding the motor wires. This makes it easy for me to swap out boards for whatever reason. I also wanted to get the largest battery to fit in my fan system so I make sure to check all the dimensions and tolerances of each part to ensure it would all fit. Since I got a larger battery I also make the charge rate 500 maH instead of the conservative 300 maH that I previously had. Another thing I made sure of was that the clips and charging port are facing the correct directions. The micro USB faces downwards because that is where the cable will come from and the battery and power wires are both coming from the right hand side.

I am still waiting on some parts to come in but I am very excited because this board looks clean and is well thought out for how it will be used daily rather than a quick prototype. Will update soon

The goal of this research is to create an automated system to clean 3D metal prints that are in the post processing phase. The method is faster, cleaner, and less hazardous. This section highlights the electronics done for the Depowdering team project.

At this stage of the project, the goals were to create blowing and vacuum controls so that the DENSO robot arm would be able to clear the powder left over from the 3D metal printing.

An Arduino shield was created in order in order to control all of these systems. A relay switch was used to switch the vacuum on and a combination of a transistor and servo controls were used to control the pressure systems for the blowing. Other things were added into this system like a regulator, manual switch controls, and LED feedback for debugging issues.

The overall goal was to have all the controls in a unified board so that updates would be easy and there would be useful feedback to the user. To get an idea of what the system is like and how the blower and vacuum are implemented please watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaQI2krnaYQ&feature=youtu.be

Bathroom buzzer is an easy solution to an age-old issue, putting the toilet seat down. Some people (maybe myself) get into arguments with their girlfriends about the subject. Since I am an engineer, I thought, why not solve the problem with technology rather than forcing myself to learn a new habit?

The project works by having a normally open reed switch system connected to a microcontroller and a piezo buzzer. The circuit is closed when the seat is lifted, and the microcontroller turns on. After waiting an X amount of time, the microcontroller will actuate the piezo buzzer, alerting the individual and others that the seat needs to be put down.

The microcontroller is an ATtiny85, just an Arduino with 5 I/O pins instead of dozens. Since this project only needed one I/O pin, it worked perfectly. This system also does not take much power, so running this on a 2032 watch battery is enough to power it for months at a time used correctly.

For a quick demo, click the link: https://youtu.be/Q1mqpXWR1mI.

I have been developing newer versions of this design. If it is to have a smaller profile, smaller IC, or different trigger method. Right now, I am focusing on finding the best trigger method. The first prototype worked, but after months of use, the wires were destroyed from the seat crushing it. I want to make a more thought-out solution, so I have been playing with different magnets and reed switches and placing them in other spots on the toilet seat.

This is a small project that made me take steps into the PCB field. I wanted to play with RGB led since it has a large degree of control and the fact that small LED driven projects can be very effective at giving information while also looking beautiful.

The first prototype has a DIP Attiny85 controller that has just enough pins to control the RGB LED. Only two of them have PWM capabilities so I had to do a Digital pin to trigger the red in the LED. This still allows for the colors to come out interestingly. There is also switch to turn the system on and off again and a 2032 coincell on the back to give it power which is held by a through hole coincell retainer.

In the V2 iteration I wanted a smaller profile. I felt that the V1 was too chunky and unattractive. I decided to swap the DIP with a SOP Attiny85. This meant I could use a smaller profile board and it was also surface-mount. Since I put the coincell on the other side of the board this meant that I could make a smaller PCB because the SOP does not have through-hole pins that would require more area. This is the first time that I programmed an SOP IC so I had to purchase a programmer that would allow me to clip onto it. It works well and I prefer this method as I do no need desolder the board like I would to the DIP which makes the board feel more legitimate. I also changed the 2032 coincell to a 2016 coincell. This makes the battery 1.6 mm smaller height wise. It does make the battery have 6 times less charge when being used but it lasted for a whole days worth even with the smaller battery which is more than enough for this project. I changed the coincell retainer to from through hole to surface-mount just to keep everything consistent.

V3 is currently being made where I make some minor updates to the traces and have a shorter switch on the board. The switch in V1 and V2 functioned well but they are 3.2 mm tall which makes my board too tall for my liking and eliminates the height savings that I worked hard for in the other parts. I also want to make V3 have a plastic cover on top so that it can look like a finished widget.

This chair was made for a class project where we had to create environmentally friendly furniture and be able to sit on it for a whole minute. This was designed and fabricated in the course of 2 days.

I used wood from a sustainable forest company and organic cotton fabric for the seating cushions. Since we had to prototype so fast, we used VR , with the game Google TiltBrush, to create a crude mock-up of what the chairs basic designs would be and CADed this in Solidworks. After doing so, we used a CNC router to cut out the parts and then assembled everything by hand.

This project was based on an entrepreneur class competition that required teams to sell and make any type of profit within the time span of a month.

After not making small margins from selling food goods we decided to use our engineering skills to our advantage.

We utilized our team’s networks and sold CNC routed paddles to Greek fraternities for decoration purposes. We also CNC routed and laser etched names on Scottie dogs to sell to the public.

Our team had an engineering edge which led us to win the competition by selling 25% more than the second place team. This was a interesting competition because the team that wins gets to keep the money they make while also obtaining the other teams money as well, creating a large pool of money that was in excess of $8,000.

We created a vast tubing installation lit up internally. This was a class project for an inflatables class. The installation was paired with another class that played experimental music where students would sleep during the event.

We created a timing pusher system for buggy practices. There is a lot of uncertainty in our timing of individual pushers. People use stop watches but we always second guess ourselves and it is recorded inefficiently by individuals. The goal of this project was to record the start and stop time of pushing buggies but also offloading the data .

If we made this on a normal Arduino system then the electronics would be trivial but then there would not be that instant knowledge of how the person performed.

The system works by having a logarithmic light sensor paired with a Particle Photon. It was attached to a buggy with a modified go-pro mount and powered by a phone-charging battery pack . We would use a diffraction laser to create a start and finish line and the sensor would be tripped whenever the buggy would pass. The Photon is a micro-controller device that can send information to an online server without the individual having to deal with all the networking setup. We paired this with a phone’s hot spot and it worked as intended.

I Utilize my electromechanical skills to create a convection oven that is self-sufficient. This oven was created in order to increase the racing performanceof the wheels on the buggy. We wanted a system that could put even heating on the wheels, so buying a convection oven was out of the question.

The goal was to heat the wheels to temperatures quickly and accurately, granting the best possible performance. There is also a holding mechanism for the wheels for ease of use to the user.

The convection oven has PID control system that takes in thermocouple readings and control the fan speeds. The fans create the force convection to create large amounts of heat transfer on the wheels. It also has a mechanical rotisserie system to have consistent heating all around the wheel.

This is a dog bag holder. A friend needed a design that would hold a roll but also keys or a dog leash. That way walking a dog would be more organized and streamlined.

This design was simple to implement since I was FDM 3D printing the component. Because of my manufacturing method, I just fused a key hanger with a roll holder. This is the second iteration with the first just having thinner wall sections and looser dimensions. The current model is a tighter fit and more rugged.

The most novel implementation is that the design has a quick-release pin. I wanted to make this design as simple as possible and so when the roll needed changing it should be easy to do as well. Originally I was thinking of using a nut and bolt but that would require certain tools and a lot more effort to remove. The switch to quick-release went from a five minute process to five second installation.

This servo board was a part of a larger project to make a retrofit smart shower system. The project as a whole was not finished but the prototyping for certain sections were completed. I created a servo controlling PCB for controlling waterproof servos.

The board was meant to have all the components for controlling servos in a compact area so that it could fit in an 2.5” container. Based off bathroom safety standards I found that an IP64 rated container was needed if I were to place this underneath the shower-head area. For reference, there is an illustration that shows the areas of different IP rating

I have had too many projects where wires come out so I decided to create a board that can rigidly hold everything together. The servos needed 7V, the microcontroller needed 5V, so I had to add a regulator to give the proper voltage. The microcontroller was 3.3V logic and so I had to also add in a logic leveler to convert it into 5V in order to properly control servos .

Overall, this was a compact and clean design that did what it was designed for.