Course overview

One of the standout courses in the engineering physics degree at UBC is ENPH 253. Technically called “Instrument Design”, this class is more commonly referred to as “Robot Summer”. Teams of four students work for six weeks to create a fully autonomous robot, which can navigate a course. Then, they compete to see whose ‘bot is the best.

The theme for this year’s competition was “Pet Rescue”. We needed to design a robot which could navigate a course, detect stuffed animals, pick them up, and bring them back to a safe area. The full competition rules can be found here.

These past four months, from January to May, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Dometic, at their Vancouver facility. My role was to assist the machining and automation engineering departments in setting up a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, to monitor the numerous CNC mills and lathes at their facility.

The primary piece of software which I worked with was Ignition, which is a tool which interfaces with the OPC drivers provided by the manufacturers, facilitates logging of data to SQL server, and allows the creation of dashboards to monitor both current plant performance, as well as historical KPIS .

The physics department at UBC has a student machine shop, which is accessible to students. They require a training course to gain access to this facility, to ensure proper and safe use of the machinery. Given my experience with hands on fabrication from working with NorthForge over the summer, I decided taking this course would be a great opportunity to get additional hands-on experience with engineering skills.

One of my favourite courses this semester, and by far the one I spent the most time on, was my software development course, CPEN 221. This course builds upon prior knowledge of programming, and teaches students how to write large scale, practical code, which is testable, maintainable, and functional.

Although this course is presented through the lens of Java, and students do become highly competent in that programming language, a focus is placed on concepts which are held in common by all modern programming languages. Examples from other relevant languages are used to develop a deeper understanding of course material, and make sutdents more comfortable picking up languages as needed.

To learn more about the woodworking process, I made some picture frames to hang my cross-stitching pieces in. I primarily used elm for this project, as I was able to find some salvageable boards in the scrap bin, and also get some from a previous employer.

Although picture frames seem simple, there are still a number of techniques one can use to produce one. And, because the piece is intended to be decorative, any small mistakes will be obvious. There are four key steps that I identified to making a frame:

I’ve made a number of laser cutting projects while at Northforge, and not all of them are large enough to fill a full article.

My first project was to create a finger-jointed box to store some of my sewing and cross stitch supplied in. It was fun modelling the parts in Fusion, as I got to take advantage of the Mirror and Slice tools to speed up my workflow and ensure everything fit together correctly.

I have seen many laser cut maps for sale at farmers markets and gift stores, but given that I have access to a laser cutter though Northforge, I decided to make my own. The main guide I followed was this one , but it uses Adobe Illustrator, which I do not have a licence for.

I adapted the process to work using CorelDraw, which is the vector drawing software Northforge has, and also is the software set up to export to the laser cutting machines in the facility.

For the past few years, I’ve been cross stitching as a way to relax. I like how I can follow a pattern someone else created, listen to some music, and eventually end up with a beautiful piece of art to display. Below are a few of the pieces that I’ve made. Patterns are from DMC, as well as this book.

However, I’ve found my hand gets tired after holding the hoop for a long period of time. Given that I’ve recently gotten access to a bunch of woodworking tools at Northforge, I decided to make a cross stitch stand from scratch, rather than buy one online.