The focus of this engineering class was to work on solving weekly industry design challenges using modern mechanical design methods (E.g. O-Rings for water-tight enclosures) with detailed CAD, bill of materials and engineering drawings. As a supplement, many manufacturing processes like extrusions, sheet metal stamping, milling, and die casting were covered.
Project 1:
This week you work for the design consulting firm Alloy up in San Francisco. One of their clients is working on a line of bicycle accessories and your manager has asked you to generate at least two different concepts for a bike mounting bracket for use in an apartment, garage, or office. Fabrication should predominately rely on sheet metal stamping and forming. Your job is to generate a pitch deck (a presentation) that is two slides long to communicate the pluses and minuses of the two concepts you’ve generated.
Project 2:
You are a mechanical designer working for the hardware team at GoPro. They are interested in improving the user experience for the GoPro HERO8 Black. The major pain point is the sliding quick snap attachment of the camera mount, which tends to be challenging to install and release when wearing gloves. Your manager has asked you to generate a concept in CAD for a “twist locking” feature to improve this user interaction. At a minimum, this will consist of two major components (or sub assemblies if more components prove useful to your design): one that attaches to the camera itself and the other that attaches to a stand of the users choosing. It is fine if the unlocking mechanism is separate or additional from the locking mechanism.
Project 3:
You have been hired by a professor in the biomechanics engineering department to design a prototype system for automatically pipetting liquid from a reagent reservoir into multi well cell culture plates to speed up their experimentation. This system must have an active work area that is at least 200mm x 200mm in the horizontal (xy) plane. The core requirement is a single degree of linear motion in the xy (horizontal) plane. This linear motion must be achieved by pneumatic actuation of the major axis of motion. You should focus on the actuator itself and its mechanical integration (and should ignore the necessary pneumatic components that exist upstream of the actuator itself like tubing, switches, air prep/filtration, etc.).
Project 4:
Ingersol-Rand is an industrial company that makes a number of products, including power tools. As a product designer working for them you have been tasked with creating an air die grinder design. If all goes well this will be a high volume, low margin product. As with all of the assignments in this course, there is a spectrum of complexity/scope across which you an interpret the prompt. The core task here is to support the rotating vane motor with bearings of your choosing and a housing of your design.
