Week One: June 05, 2015
Mikaela Juzswik
In the past week, I’ve done a couple of things that I haven’t done before during my summer breaks: operated a high-power laser cutter to make, well, a variety of objects; used a plasma cutter to blast the shape of Texas into an unsuspecting sheet of aluminum; and, worst of all, woken up before 8 am on a weekday, for five days in a row. It’s been a pretty strange week.
Also, now with 120% more baby torture.
(No babies were harmed during the making of this photo).
What this really means is that the OEDK’s summer internship program, SEED, has started in full force, and, if the past five days are any indication, I’ve also started the most exciting summer in my life. I’ve lived in Houston for the past sixteen years, so it isn’t so much the vibrantly scorching locale as it is the amazing things I hope to accomplish in the next eight (seven?) weeks. Already, I’ve explored new technology and met some pretty amazing folks, consisting a mix of students from Rice and Malawi Polytechnic, with generous help from the OEDK staff.
We hit the ground running, with a crash-course on fabrication and prototyping techniques: basic hand tool usage, 2D and 3D computer-aided design, laser cutting, plasma cutting, PCB milling for circuit board production, and finishing techniques. Because I was fortunate enough to have taken ENGI 210 at Rice before this (I highly recommend the course!), I’d already been exposed to most of the techniques listed above, so I either assisted in the teaching of these skills or worked with Harrison, another SEED intern, on assorted projects. It was a great way to either polish up my skills—the best way to learn is to teach, they say—or expand my horizons by beginning work on some of the summer projects.
The long version of some of these projects, as I feel like a lot of really great people put in a lot of quality work that shouldn’t go unignored: Harrison and I worked on two primary projects this week, along with an assortment of odd jobs. The first project was the modification of the Intubator Box, designed to help ER doctors have easier access to the tools and equipment that they need to intubate patients. Intubation, the process of inserting breathing tubes into a patient whose airway is obstructed or otherwise compromised, is often a necessary practice in emergency situations. Because of the large variety of equipment needed to conduct a successful intubation, a previous Rice engineering team worked to design a system that would organize this equipment so that doctors could have easy and fast access in emergency situations. The original team successfully designed a box made from acrylic with spinning, adjustably compartmented shelves that organized the proper equipment in a manner that made all tools easily accessible. However, their original prototype had a few flaws that prevented it from being a final design: the spinning shelves were slightly unstable, the central support system allowed for too much shaking when the shelves were being used, and the exterior of the box had few minor construction issues. Other than these issues, however, the bulk of the work had already been done by the previous design team, and Harrison and I only needed to address the stability concerns. We worked primarily on designs to construct the new box out of quarter-inch acrylic, which offered far more structural integrity than the original eighth-inch acrylic design. We also re-organized the slotting system for easier adjustable dividers in the shelves, and we modified the original ball-bearing structure around the central shaft to have more stable rotation for the interior of the box. The bulk of the modifications are already complete, although we’ve been slightly delayed by our order of new sheets of acrylic to use for the exterior of the box.
(Before (top) and after (bottom) versions of the shelves used in the Intubator Box)
We’ve only just started the second project, Incubaby, a low-cost incubator for infants made from laser-cut wood. Incubaby is a senior design project that’s also almost finished, and Harrison and I largely worked to make extra copies of the already-successful Incubaby box, using the previous designs. Outside of that, our work on the Incubaby project was minimal, largely consisting of laser cutting exterior pieces for the construction of additional Incubaby boxes.
(The current Incubaby Box)
The rest of our work this week has been a little off the beaten path. Harrison and I have given off-the-cuff demonstrations and lessons about the laser cutting module to our fellow interns, and we’ve helped them work through using these devices for projects in the OEDK. We’ve helped a little in the introduction to using Adobe Illustrator as a 2D CAD platform, and also with the basics to plasma cutting. As an added bonus, we started unboxing some of the projects for next week—the 3D printers that we’ll get to build, some of which will leave for Malawi at the end of the summer, and some of which will stay at the OEDK.
(Some of the products of our laser-cutting class)
With the basic introductions out of the way, I want to talk about boxes for a bit.
It’s been an interesting, box-filled week down here. In the past five days alone, I’ve worked with a downright absurd number of boxes—I’ve said the word ‘box’ or derivations of it eleven times in this blog post alone, despite my best efforts to have a varied word choice.
There were boxes for the 3D printers that we’re going to build next week, boxes to organize the pieces for said 3D printers, boxes to organize said boxes of pieces for said 3D printers, and so forth. Harrison and I used the laser cutter (sort of a box?) to cut pieces to be assembled into smaller boxes, many times. We ordered pieces that we needed to complete this box, and these pieces came in boxes, which had smaller boxes inside of them. The second project also involved laser cutting pieces of wood into boxes. If I were feeling particularly broad and metaphorical, I could even argue that the OEDK is basically a large box. At the bottom of this post is a sufficiently box-themed photo gallery for your perusal.
I actually am feeling particularly broad and metaphorical today, so I’ll close with this: we, as engineers but also as human beings, clearly like to have boxes. There’s a neat simplicity in being able to put things away in an organized, stackable fashion, where you can know for sure that some things just have a right place. There’s an inherent danger in this as well, though, as living inside of that box can be just as blinding and impairing to your worldview as it is supporting and protective. Boxes, like the ones Harrison and I built this week, can be extraordinarily useful; but boxes, like the tiny bubble of my college experience, or my limited experiences and worldview, can be exceedingly stifling as well.
I end my on-the-fly soapbox speech with this: the world we live in is starting to outgrow boxes. We focus now on interdependence, interdisciplinary, intercultural: inter, across, between—things you can’t do in a box. In the past five days, I’ve been working with students from a country that I previously couldn’t even point to on a map, and, with luck, we’re going to work together during the next eight weeks to change the world.
