This is wen kai: September 2019

SAE Eco-Marathon Competition

September 01, 2019

This contest was highly competitive as we had to made a "car" on our own. That was not a joke.

This car should be large enough to accommodate a driver but small and light enough to save oil. The goal of this competition was to consume the least amount of oil for the car to run though a course 40 times.

This was the first car we have made

The video was a performance test for this car without the cover. I could ran at a maximum speed of 40 miles per hour.

However, clearly we had missed the point for the first time. We should not care about the speed but the oil consumption. So the second year we did a lot of changes: we lighten the structure, took off the redundant designs, figured out a more efficient way to save oil and change the cover to a pure hand-made bamboo-weaving one.

the cover was all made by bamboo sticks weaved by our bare hands

Not only did we earned the third place this time, which was not easy for a team among those veteran teams, but we earned the first place in vehicle design this time.

the third place overall and the first place in vehicle design

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extracurricular activities

IPBL teaching assistant in Osaka Institute of Technology, Japan

September 01, 2019

IPBL stands for International Practitioner-Based Learning. There was a chance for students in our department to had academical exchange with students in OIA(Osaka Institute of Technology), and I was honored to be selected as a TA by the professor.

Objection:

Our goal was to made a mini version of wind turbine and tested its efficiency in generating electricity. The purpose was to let students had a deeper understanding in Fluid Mechanics and how the design of the blades could affect its efficiency. But most importantly, students had to conquer the barrier in language to communicate with each other to reach the goal.

the wind turbines made by students from scratch

My job was to teach them how to draw and design their blades in CREO (3D modeling software) as well as the ability to simulate the efficiency using QBlade (a software specifically designed for blade test).

me being a TA teaching 3D modeling software

students trying to communicate with each other while our TA assisting with the technical problem

What this event had brought to me?

I actually had participated this event twice. The first time I was one of the students struggling to build a wind turbine, and the second time I became a TA. But no matter what role I was playing in this academical exchange, communicated with foreigners was not as easy as just making friends with them: one could not just sit there and smile until others finished their speaking without understanding a word they had said. It was about how one articulated the idea to others with different culture background and mother language. Scratching or word-by-word translation would do, but the worst thing one could do was to avoid connections with others.

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extracurricular activities

TDK National Robot Competition

September 01, 2019

TDK national competition was a contest that required students to wielding their imagination and innovation to build a robot that could conquer all the obstacles they settled. The title that year I attended was "the water boy." We were asked to build a robot that could took out a liter of water, went through a ramp, poured the water to several glasses, walked through road humps while containing the water and placed them properly on a desk.

The problem itself was just as crazy as the robot we've made.

We might have been overdesigned the robot but this structure won us the third place in creative award, especially credited to this "umbrella design" that grabbed and placed the cups nice and neat.

Another eye-catching function was its ability to move sidewise. The video below was a test to crab-sidle a ramp and to see if the motor was strong enough to do so.

My contribution

I did the whole programming with LabVIEW + MyRIO (an embedded system featured by NI). Although this was not my first time in controlling the robot, the size of this project was way larger than previous ones and thus, different from usual, the first thing came over my head was to design a debug system that can at least separate the error from the software and the hardware.

Since every signals sent to hardware was came from one source -- MyRIO, I could build a panel that registered all the signals sent from this embedded system.

This panel registered all the signals sent from MyRIO for debugging.

And there was another page to mimic the physical controller.

Controller page for simulation.

What had I learned?

This was not a small project and it necessitated cooperation with people in different majors to distribute the load. Since the other three people were national champions, I had learned so much in machining and mechanism more than those in the textbooks. In return, I tried my best to materialize all their demanded functions such as the acceleration of the wheels, functions that mimic the differential gears in the car, and the physical controller.

Besides the technical stuffs, the communication and cooperation were two main skills I had improved. Because another teammate and I were senior than the other two, we played a role to guide them through this competition. Instead of a bossing attitude, I prefer to personally engaging in all the meetings and brainstorm to let them realize one crucial thing in all kinds of cooperation was involvement: one needed to feel oneself belonged to this team alongside with ones responsibilities.

The process was a big pain in the butt, but at least we went through them together. Despite we only got the eighth place overall, we were a great team.

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This is wen kai

SAE Eco-Marathon Competition

IPBL teaching assistant in Osaka Institute of Technology, Japan

TDK National Robot Competition

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