Small Electronics Projects
Sometimes from some classes or from being super warm in your room late at night in Kenya, you put your creativity and knowledge to the test and make up some small techy gadget to hopefully fix your problem. They are not projects that take a while, instead just quick little nuggets of fun and creativity. So here is a collection of some of them.
This is just a simple collection of little projects that are not too long to describe. I hope you enjoy!
My Introduction to Electronics
Story time! It might be funny, but I initially came to Duke wanting to study Mechanical Engineering. However, after my first Mechatronics Engineering project, I found out that I really love electronics, and I want to dive deeper into it. So I switched to Electric and Computer Engineering (always maintaining my double major in Biomedical Engineering), and ECE110: Introduction to Electrical Engineering was my official start of it. While these projects are simple, they were so fun and mind-blowing for me at the time.
In these projects, I had my first time working more in depth resistors, servos, IR transmission, Ultrasound sensors, and much more. Every week we learned a new sensor and general circuitry. For the sensors, it was all using Arduino and attachable Oscilloscopes since we were doing at home due to COVID. This is an example of a cool weekly project:
The final project for this class was a competition called the Design Challenge. We all as lab sections (composed of usually 6 students) were teams, and we were tasked with 10 different small challenges. These challenges usually consisted of using a specific sensor to accomplish something.
The first 3 tasks every person had to complete and they were graded for it. However, the remaining 7 were bonus tasks and the team could divide and conquer to finish them. They were not required, but besides getting extra points, the team that completed the most would win a "Best Lab Section" award from the ECE department haha. So I was pretty excited about it.
After we assigned tasks as a team, there was one left, the hardest one, that would be left in the air. We all had 2-3 tasks at least to complete. In fact, this is how my arduino was since we had to have all of them ready to demonstrate:
We were all on track, but I wanted to go the extra-mile. I fell in love with electronics and embedded software in this class, so I wanted to do more, especially for us to win the award. So I went for the hardest tasks, which was to use a QTS sensor to detect the speed of a moving servo. After much time troubleshooting, and testing it out, it worked! This is the sensor in action:
We all worked hard as a team, finished our tasks, and... finished the competition in first place!! The difference? There was only one team that was able to finish the hardest task. And I felt so happy to know my work contributed to the team!
Fan in Kenya
I was trying to find a way to deal with the heat in Kenya when we were there to work in our irrigation device, so I decided to plug some of our electronics together and I got this!
MATLAB Music
For my class in Signals and Systems, we needed to create a 1-minute sample of a famous song by synthesizing tones in MATLAB. We did that by using our knowledge of sinusoids and mathematical operations that modulate frequencies in the way we wanted. Here is my sample of Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars.
Takeaway: I am very grateful for the flexibility and opportunities the Engineering program at Duke provides. I love engineering, design, and through my journey with it, I have found out that I especially love working with embedded devices! I love electronics, embedded software and solving the puzzles that come with making these things work.