Melissa Ma
Junior Mechanical Engineering Student @ University of Toronto | Engineering with a Purpose
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Automatic Indoor Plant Watering System
SolidWorks | Project Management | Leadership Skills | Research Skills
If you've owned a plant, you know how high maintenance they can be when it comes to watering. The goal is to design a system that automatically waters indoor plants with minimal human intervention, to keep the plants healthy :)
Full design document can be found here
Conceptual designs
Role
Mechanical Designer | CAD Designer| Team Leader
Project Highlights
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Generated engineering specifications, functions, and objectives
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Spearheaded meetings with the client and kept track of project progress using Gantt Charts
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Created design and 3D rendering in SolidWorks
Tools
SolidWorks | Project Management | Leadership Skills | Research Skills
Results/Lessons Learned
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Top 2% team out of 160 teams
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Effectively used SolidWorks mates to create assemblies for conceptual designs
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When generating candidate conceptual designs, there are many tools that can be used. For example, mass brainstorming, getting inspiration from nature, benchmarking against existing products on the market, using the Blackbox method, etc.
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Primary/secondary functions, objectives, constraints, pugh charts, and weighted decision matrices are good tools to select the final design
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Prototypes are everything. Low fidelity prototypes, 3D models, or even surveys are crucial to getting feedback both on the engineering side and the consumer experience side
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How to create Gantt charts and progress reports to effectively communicate with engineering managers and clients
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As the team leader, delegated different research tasks, hosted MS Teams meetings, created meeting agendas, kept track of the Team Charter, and corresponded with the manager and client