Ufu Ovienmhada
Haptamaze
The final project for a class i took my freshman year was to build something that utilizes haptic feedback. With a group of 3, I designed and programmed a 2 degree of freedom maze that tracks the movement of the user using teleoperation. The project responds to ‘hitting a wall’ in the virtual maze by provided the user with force feedback. The mechanical components and the two-degrees-of-freedom position sensing code already in place make the Haptamaze a highly adaptable device. It could naturally be expanded to more complex mazes, or use it for other virtual games. Different damping and textures could be programmed in to create a complex, compelling haptic environment for a user to explore. For example, using damping, textures, and walls, the device could be programmed to represent a topographic map as we initially envisioned.
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Latest Projects - click to expand photos
Automatic Kibble Launcher
In a 3 week summer seminar titled "Life in the Zoo," groups of 4 were assigned an animal from the San Francisco Zoo and tasked with building a device that enriched the animal's life. After collecting behavorial data on the grizzly bears for a week, we set out to construct something that would get the 2 grizzly bears to be more active and decrease worrisome behaviors such as pacing which is a sign of boredom or anxiety. In a 4 day span, we constructed and programmed an autonomous kibble launcher that projects bear kibble into the enclosure at random angles, random quanitites, and random times throughout the day. We were able to collect behavioral data after employing the device and found that it did indeed stimulate the bears and made them more interactive with their enclosure. The device is currently in use at the San Francisco Zoo.
Sustainable Smart Sink
Inspired by the Nest learning thermostat, my undergraduate research partner and I set out to build a Sustainable Smart sink during our summer research internship. After installing hardware and writing an arduino program, by the end of the summer, we had a product that had predefined settings for water flow and temperature for different tasks (i.e. hand washing vs dish washing) that we had decided were sustainable settings. These settings were produced for a user by rotating the servos on either faucet side to the corresponding angles. However, if a user decided that they were unhappy with the settings for a task, they could manually adjust it with potentiometers (disguised as sink knobs) and the sink would then learn the users preferences and produce these settings the next time the user desired to perform that task. Future work to be done would be to install sensors that could distinguish between users allowing us to store several users' preferences, as well as to develop an algorithm that would better take into account user preferences while training them to want the sustainable settings.
ME101 Design Challenge
In a class titled ME101: Visual Thinking, in groups of 4 we were tasked with designing to solve a problem loaded with constraints. We had to pass a ping pong ball from one tower to another tower. The constraints were that we had to be able to assemble the design on site from a minimum 4 feet away, we could not touch the ping pong ball or tower with our bodies at any time, the towers had a minimum height of 4 feet and our materials were constrained to foam core. Additionally, we needed to tell a story or depict a theme in our design. Our team designed an "Up" themed project to accomplish the task. The ball dropped through the block tower into the iconic house from the movie and using a weight activated pulley system was lifted to the top of Paradise Falls. I played a primary role in designing the aesthetic portions of the projects such as making the house and the waterfall from scratch.
More photos can be found here.
LED Cube
To build this cube, I soldered 4 4x4 LED planes and stacked them, built the drive circuit and used time division multiplexing in Arduino to control 64 LEDs.