Collaborate

Engage & Persist

Coding

Project Paragraph

Growth Paragraph

Image 3

Image 4

Lo-fi prototyping

Our project is an electric vehicle for people who make a lot of short trips in gasoline vehicles around the city. This electric vehicle would help reduce their carbon emissions, while still allowing them quick and private transportation. This means that people can still have the privacy, reliablity, and speed of private vehicles, while not having a negative impact on the environment. We had many sketches and multiple prototypes, and it eventually culminated in two 'final products;' a paper scale model of the vehicle, and a chain drive using a motor to show how the inner mechanics of the vehicle would work. All of the prototypes showcased their use and worked extremely well, so we have gained a lot of confidence in the idea.

I learned a lot about collaborating with my peers in this project. Although I had different ideas of what we should be working on, as I thought working on a controllable model would be a lot more important than a chain drive system, we ended up compromising and making both. I think I also learned a lot about engage and persist, as during the process of building the remote control model I ran into a lot of problems and had to figure out how to fix them. One example is that the arduino was the only board we could reliably get to access the motor controller, but the ESP is the only board with access to WiFi. It seems like a simple issue, connect the arduino to the ESP and you're done; but the ESP and arduino use different voltage levels (how much power they use). I tried making some different types of voltage dividers, but eventually found that the ESP has a regulated input for the arduino's power level, which was extremely helpful. In doing all of my work with building the vehicle, I learned a lot about coding (obviously) and the importance of prototyping. I had many iterations of my remote-controlled vehicle, so I realize now how important getting a good prototype down can be.