Next Up
Product Design and Development
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products
Breaking the Social Media Prism
A Hunter Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century
Recently Finished
Blog
-
Bookshelf
July 13, 2023
Bookshelf
Living document of recent books I've read, and books I want to read
-
RÜF
Oct 3, 2022
RÜF
A reflection on a failed venture
RÜF is a project that myself and one of my closest friends Ethan Childerhose (of the well known bigcrete.engineering) worked on as part of an entrepreneurship course. The course, BET300 under the Conrad school of business, required a venture to be conceptualized and developed over 4 months. Ethan already had this idea to automate the roofing process and we couldn’t poke any holes in it at the time, so we went through with it.
ProblemThe problem we identified was that the blue collar workforce is shrinking, apprenticeship registration has been declining, and yet the construction industry is growing. In the roofing industry in particular, 39% of expenses are tied up in labor. This increasing cost just gets passed on to the customer, who pays around $10k for a roof replacement. The work is hard, dangerous, and nowadays you have to pay people a lot to do it. There has been almost no innovation in the roofing industry since the air gun 50 years ago.
SolutionThe solution we came up with takes the form of a robot that can hold a stack of shingles, and nail them down automatically. The robot would traverse to a modified shingle elevator (common in the industry) which would load the robot up, it would diagonally drive across the roof, placing a shingle and nailing it in. We hoped that the robot would be able to do at least 80% of the roof as doing dormers, ridges, and valleys seemed too complicated. A roofing company would rent robots from us, while a small crew would go around and do the parts that the robot couldn’t do.
A concept of the robot in question is shown below, but not fully realized or designed.
We also had an idea to produce accurate quotes using drones. The idea being that a drone could fly around the roof recording it. This video could be processed with semantic segmentation and VSLAM to estimate the amount of area and complexity of the roof. This would lead to less material waste and more accurate quotes for customers. A concept of what this would look like is shown below:
One of our assignments in the course was to apply to the Concept 5k pitch competition, which we did. Ethan did a fantastic job at pitching, making it through the semi finals before losing in the finals. You can watch the pitch here: (https://youtu.be/T2CKR_hhoMc?t=2517)
ReflectionIf I’m completely honest, I didn’t expect to learn anything by taking this course. It seemed like an easy credit and maybe I could meet some cool people. But what's special about BET300 is that it forces you to commit to an idea for at least 4 months, similar to a capstone project. You better make sure you like your idea and are willing to put a lot of work into it, and this was great for deeply thinking about roofing as a problem space. I think that we could have done better in 2 main ways, so here's what I learned.
You have to get really close to the problem space you want to solve. Even better if it's a problem you personally have. I personally do not have the problem of a roofing job being too expensive. We convinced ourselves really early on that this was a very possible and profitable business, without ever looking at how much labor was actually tied up in nailing shingles. In fact, we still don’t know, because it turns out roofers are hard to talk to. But despite this, we dove in head first. It could have ended up only being 20% of their labor charge and we wouldn’t have realized this until it was too late. Yes we did our groundwork and our research, but we never actually went out to a job site and watched the process. I think the reason we didn’t win Concept 5k was because one of the judges asked “have you ever roofed a house?” and Ethan has to respond with no, and neither have I. It’s easy to criticize things when you aren’t involved in them. Looking back on it, it seems like a silly idea that a modern robot could pull its weight in a fast paced job site. Maybe one day.
Your team needs to be on board, and obsessed with the problem. Even though we couldn’t kill the idea, none of us were particularly passionate about the construction industry or roofing. We had no family ties to the business, or any reason to be interested. It just seemed to be a space lacking innovation. When I worked at Matician, the CEO Mehul Nariyawala would always preach that there's a lot of potential for disruption in “un-sexy” industries. No one wants to start a company here or wants to work here, but it's something that has to be done. I think PayPal is a good example, it was an uphill battle to convince people to put their money and banking information on the internet. It required fighting regulators, mountains of paperwork, and bureaucratic nightmares. But the result is a clean and easy solution for personal payment or commercial payment. To me, I see it as one of the “enablers” of startups, of which I have found four:
1. No one has thought of it (Tesla, DoorDash, Netflix, Yelp)
2. No one knows how to do it (SpaceX, Neuralink, Boston Dynamics)
3. No one was doing it well enough (Apple, YouTube, Discord, Twitch)
4. No one wants to do it (PayPal, Credit Karma)
If you are able to break one of these four statements, you may have a golden ticket, or so I believe. The problem with our team was that we couldn’t find any passion for working on the “un-sexy” problem, and losing the Concept 5k was the last blow.
Edit: A friend of mine recently told me to check out Renovate Robotics who seems to have just launched with a very similar system/vision as us. It’s always really cool to see competition because it means you’re solving the right problems - all the best.
-
On Internships
Sep 16, 2022
My 2 Cents
On getting, choosing, and maintaining internships
I’ve been around the block. I get the same questions from people over and over. I hope to answer the common ones here, and provide some of my advice.
Getting ThemPlease keep in mind this advice comes from a mechanical engineering perspective, this advice might not always be helpful. A couple steps can drastically improve your rate of interviewing and your rate of offers.
1. Don’t bother with cover letters
Try uploading a blank page instead.
2. Include a portfolio of your work
The number one way you can increase your chances of getting an internship, especially for hardware (mechanical and electrical). Show off all your previous work, make sure to include images, and not just renders - show what you built in real life. That last part is important, prototyping and building things with your hands is required for a ton of jobs. Make sure to include this in all your applications.
3. Start high, end low
For your first internship you should be applying to 100+ positions, especially if you don’t have much experience. For every subsequent internship you should halve that number. Make sure that for your first internship you apply to as many jobs as possible, as many that you could actually picture yourself working in. For me this was around 60, but I wish I had done more - I had friends that had applied to 150+. You also don’t want too many interviews, which will become a problem in later terms. They are time consuming, exhausting, and stressful. So only apply to those that you would actually accept, not just because they sound cool or you’ve heard of the company before.
4. Method of applying
Avoid your university's job portal if possible, it’s probably helpful for your first 1 or 2 jobs but after that it can actually be detrimental. Waterloo for example only lets you “reject” 3 offers - if you get more than that you may be randomly paired to work with a company. If you go against this rule they will kick you off the platform and you could incur penalties. Apply on the companies website directly instead, and if they don’t have an internship posting, apply to a full time position anyway. Just be sure to note you’re only looking for an internship.
5. Finding companies
Some people don’t know what exists and therefore don’t even know where to apply. Most know the big names, but a lot of cool startups fly under the radar. Keep up to date with cool founders on LinkedIn/Twitter and companies will be sure to follow. Also check out workatastartup.com and angel.co/.
Choosing ThemThe three main variables that make choosing between offers hard is:
1. Learning opportunities
2. Clout
3. Benefits
And I believe they should be evaluated in that order, with heavy emphasis on the first 2.Learning opportunities is how well you’ll be able to grow in the field you're interested in, so base this off of your superior's experience and what your job responsibilities are. Keep in mind, you may be able to move around a bit once you accept the job, more often than not startups are more lenient to this, but I’ve heard of it happening at bigger companies too. For example I have a friend that always joins companies as a mechanical engineer, but always ends up doing software projects on the side. If you’re comfortable with being more forward in interviews, try asking the leadership some questions too. This will give you a proxy of what the company culture is like, and how much you might be able to learn. Ali Partovi also gave me a good insight into judging management, think about how you want to learn. If you like to be taught, picking a company with senior management may be better, and if you like to learn on your own, look for management closer to your age (ie. 25-35).
Clout is a factor that blinds a lot of people, and to be fair is likely proportional to your future opportunities, but if you have to sacrifice learning opportunities it could be quite hurtful. For instance, say you have an offer at Google for front end development and another at a startup for full stack. And say you want to have a future in full stack, it may be a better idea to take the startup job now, and wait until Google gives you a full stack offer in a later term. This happened to me with Tesla, it was either I took a Tesla manufacturing job or a design job at Matician, I took the latter in hopes that I would get a design job at Tesla at a later date. And the bet worked out well, plus I had connections to Tesla recruiters that helped me get a design job a couple months later. I always recommend prioritizing learning over clout, especially if you have multiple internship terms like we do at Waterloo, there will always be another opportunity next term. If you can get the job now you can definitely get it next term!
The last factor is pay and benefits, another one that clouds people's judgment. Now there is an exception to this; if you absolutely need the money to pay for expenses (school, rent, etc.), and taking an offer with less compensation would put you in a financially challenging situation, take the higher offer. But if you can manage with less money and it means taking a better job, I would take it every time. And honestly, don’t even pay attention to benefits, it's just money disguised as free lunch - and “there ain’t no such thing as free lunch”.
Let's talk quickly about returning to a previous employer. Let's look at two hypothetical college students Fizz and Buzz. Let’s also assume that knowledge accumulation at a company follows a log(t) function, where the learning rate slowly decreases the longer you work at the same place. I believe this is a safe assumption. Fizz thinks that he can learn more by returning to his previous employer. By gaining more and more trust he hopes to eventually be taking on bigger projects, and thus learning more. Buzz believes that he should work at a new company and never return to the same one twice, at least before full time. Over the course of 6 internships and a total of 24 months (standard Waterloo coop program) Fizz realizes that by returning to the same place so many times, he really didn’t take advantage of the rapid learning that always happens when brought into a new company culture. After Fizz’s first term, he returns to complete the same project he was working on, not learning any new skills. For his third term, he gets a new project and completes it, but since it's still a similar technology to his previous internships, he doesn’t learn much more. For his fourth and fifth he takes on a large 8 month project, again not learning much more. Finally for his sixth term he tries a new company and experiences a plethora of new leadership, coworkers, culture, and technology, giving him rapid knowledge accumulation. While Fizz was returning to the same company, Buzz experienced this rapid growth 6 times, ending up with much more knowledge gain. Buzz also has a much broader range of skills and companies to show on his resume, while Fizz just has a large list of projects at the same company. Buzz has 3X the network, 3X more variety, and has probably learned 3X more industry specific knowledge. The two strategies can be seen compared below.
I hope this simple simulation demonstrates why never returning to the same company twice is the best strategy. The only exception I would make is if you want to completely pivot your path (ie. switch from full stack to firmware) and it is easier to do that within the same company since you have a strong internal network. In that scenario, it’s basically the same as starting at a new company.
Finally I want to cover the process of choosing between two great offers, which can be extremely stressful. My recommendation is to go through the factors I have outlined above and compare them, weighting learning experiences the most, and benefits the least. I would be lying if I told you I have never made a decision table with all kinds of arbitrary metrics to calculate the optimal job, but let me tell you, this isn’t something that can be calculated like everything else in this field - it needs to be felt. What do you feel will give you a better learning experience? Feel free to ask the interviewers questions about what you can learn from them. Prioritize that over the clout and benefits, if you still can’t decide, move on to clout. How well known are they? Do they have a strong reputation? If you think all those things are still tied or can’t evaluate them, choose the one with better benefits. If you want to do both jobs eventually, ask them both if they would be willing to defer, I’ll talk about this next.
Maintaining ThemIf you are thinking of deferring your offer, I have some advice for you. Send a professional email to both companies, asking to defer. Make sure you mention that by deferring you will be better experienced, and that you want to work at both companies desperately. By asking both companies, you keep your options open. See which one is more lenient, and which is more strict. Take the strict one for your next opportunity and then hope the other one allows you to move the offer. Tesla tends to be very lenient, as they're always in demand for interns, Apple on the other hand does not normally do this, and have very strict rules on hiring interns for certain lengths of time. Keep in contact with the employer you intend to defer, even if they don’t agree to push back your offer, by staying in touch it will make it much easier to get the offer again at a later time.
Keeping a strong network is crucial for success, so whether you take an offer or not, make sure you keep in touch with recruiters and anyone else involved in your interview process. Add them on LinkedIn, email them quarterly about their hiring needs, or what they are working on, etc. During your internship try to meet as many new people as possible, you would be surprised at how much you can learn just by chatting. Stay in touch with these people too, add them on LinkedIn and your network will grow exponentially.
-
On Education
Jul 24, 2022
On Education
My rambling thoughts about the current post secondary environment
PrefaceI understand that critiquing is easier than correcting, and if you’re in the education space I don’t mean any offense. I just wanted to make my views public and get them out there.
IntroductionWithout directing my drive and motivation towards creating things I go stir crazy. I see it every semester, I get bored of school after a week and start an overly ambitious project that pulls my time away from studying. Instead of Netflix or going out, you'll find me procrastinating by building things. You would think it's akin to a passion vector for anything engineering related, including school - but this is not the case. Waterloo might be specifically bad, maybe it's not even Waterloo, maybe it's my program or even my specific class’s poor luck. But a string of bad teachers, and horrible organization (especially through COVID) has made me realize that I have been scammed. Scammed out of around 64k dollars, not including the cost of textbooks that are surely needed when the professors are as inadequate as they are.
Professor MotivationAnother problem I've noticed is that professors just don't care. A lot of them just want to work on their research or if tenured, do as little work as possible. These professors are required to teach a certain amount of courses (full-time faculty in the professorial ranks are expected to teach at least 2/3 semesters), and so a lot of the time they care very little about the quality of the education they provide. At least one of my professors every semester falls into this category. This seems to be one of the root causes of why students aren't motivated, because the professors aren't motivated either. This leads to low energy and poor quality lectures, labs that aren't challenging, and assessments that don't make you think. Not having challenging material and withholding valuable feedback leads to students that slack off and don’t learn from mistakes, for instance take a look at my most recent Design and Dynamics of Machines quiz distribution.
Now like I said before, I have no proof if this is a University problem, a Waterloo problem, or my program/class, and I would love to hear about the conditions at other schools. Regardless of the answer to that question, I firmly believe that our approach to learning is broken. Currently, my program requires 5-8 hours of straight focusing in lectures with a 1 hour break, and I leave the lectures with nothing more than "wow I have a lot to catch up on" every day. Then in order to stay on top of content there's around 2-3 hours of homework and reading to be done. There are few profs that are actually interesting enough to pay attention to, and even then they tend to not understand how to describe, articulate, or focus on the actual challenging concepts. All too often the most amount of class time is spent on easy concepts, leaving no time for the complicated stuff until it appears on the exam. Speaking of exams, of all the 25+ courses I have taken, almost all of the ones students considered "fair" or "easy" were just regurgitation of the problem sets and practice exams. And the ones that actually make you think? The ones that check your deep knowledge of the material? They're considered too hard and get curved up. The professors get scared of bad ratings and negative feedback and change the way they assess in order to be more predictable. All but 2 courses I have taken in my post secondary career had the exact same theme of questions as the previous year. Now mind you, my grades are very happy about this, but I can feel it poisoning my brain, rewarding it for not learning or thinking but recognizing patterns instead.
I had a grade 12 advanced calculus teacher that was fantastic at avoiding this, everyone hated him but me. He would put an entirely new type of question on the tests, or even introduce new concepts to learn in the test. I understand it sounds horrible, I hated it too at the time. But after getting the satisfaction of solving a couple correctly and developing a deep understanding of the content, I came out thankful. He really demonstrated to me what real testing meant.
Another controversial example of this was my sensors and instrumentations professor. Everyone who did mechatronics at Waterloo knows who I am talking about, he's been teaching the course since before my parents met. I am talking about James Barby and MTE 220, a right of passage for Waterloo mechatronics engineers. I was the last class he taught, and I think towards the end of his career his effort started to taper off. But his questions really made you think, he was tough and unrelenting. Sadly given that he had taught the course so many times, all challenging questions had basically been repeated in previous years, and a lot of the assessments were still pattern recognition.
One of my closest friends has stopped going to class entirely, and then days before exams just learns the types of questions on previous exams. Like I stated before; it's simple pattern recognition, our brains are great at it. He consistently gets higher grades than me, yet puts in a percentage of the amount of effort. For the last two weeks of my current semester I did the same thing, and read the equivalent chapters in the textbook. It takes a lot of motivation to pick up a textbook and read it when you could be doing a bunch of other things instead of school. Despite this, I found that the textbook was more engaging than most lecturers, it gives great examples and more intuitive explanations. You could argue that if you really wanted to learn you would go to class and it wouldn't matter what was covered by the assessments, but then at that point why do assessments exist? Would people really go to class if there weren't assessments? Why wouldn’t we see random unenrolled strangers attending lectures? Everyone's doing it for the degree, and that means passing the exams.
IT and CompetenceAfter school went online in 2020 it was revealed how disorganized the university truly was. Almost every class used a different video conferencing software, by the end of 2 semesters online I had:
- Microsoft Teams
- Zoom
- Bongo
- WebEx
- WebEx Training (yes apperantly thats a different version)
- Google Meets
- Some fake Zoom that I can no longer find
Out of the 17 classes I took online, only 1 of them knew how to properly mute the whole class and use the admin controls all these softwares offer. The rest were a wild west of interruptions, and pure incompetency when things went wrong. In 2021 when things went hybrid it got even worse, now instructors needed to take questions from in person and online, while simultaneously video streaming the whiteboard or screen sharing. Only a handful of professors stayed on top of this, the rest were such a disaster most of the class would stop showing up to weekly lectures (one specific class had <10 people a lecture for 3 months straight). One class had such a bad internet connection that attending online was completely impractical. Even now in 2022 that were back in class, instructors still aren't taught how to use the controls in the classroom for the projector, microphone, or overhead lighting. They can’t even make consistently formatted assignments, or the assignments aren’t even legible (see below).
LabsAnother thing I think is horribly broken is labs. I haven't had a good experience since my first semester. Most of the time there's no purpose or application given for what you're doing, so they feel pointless even though they're supposed to be the application part of our education. For all the labs I've had, there is a strict guide that tells you exactly what steps to do and how to do them so that you don't break equipment, but this just makes followers - and to quote Tom Peters, "Good leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.". The labs should instead be designed to teach students how to fail, let them blow stuff up (but make sure it's on them when it does). This is how I learned practical skills as a kid, and it worked very well. Not having a lot of money and having a small collection of electronics parts meant I couldn't afford mistakes, I had skin in the game, so I had to trust myself and truly understand what I was doing. Current labs are the opposite, my actuators course has us plugging in wires into $10k machines that the university obviously doesn't want to break, so they tell us where every single wire goes and make us double check it. The one exception to this is MTE 220 (shoutout) where there were lots of custom designed parts, and plenty of opportunity to break things.
DiscussionWhen asking peers what they've learned at university, a lot of them can't recall details. For example, when asking a friend about his circuits course he didn't remember how to wire an op-amp, or what the pinout was, or even what it did (he gave a subpar explanation). When asking him why he's in school if he isn't remembering content he said “I think school is mostly about learning to learn”. Are you really learning how to learn? Or are you learning how to pass? Post secondary started as a way to train professionals for the workplace, but it has evolved into turning students into pattern recognizing machines - the worst way to learn. This will only get you so far in the real-world. In order to properly innovate you need to deeply understand first principles, not just doing things “because we've always done it that way” and repeating the pattern of our priors.
Another mediocre benefit of modern school is learning what exists in the first place, and knowing what to search for when you get stuck. This is very valid, but I don't think it's worthy of much credit. Informing people on what exists is much easier than teaching it to them. For example, explaining that Kalman filters are used for processing sensor data as opposed to explaining how they work and how to implement them. If this were the only benefit of modern education, a degree could be completed in a single semester. But like I said, this is still very useful. I often don't realize how little I know and end up in the Dunning-Kruger pit of despair but then again, it's fun to be enlightened. I think something as simple as a good visual of showing people what they know and what they don't know would be sufficient. A multi layer radar chart comes to mind, where a tree of knowledge broken down by levels (ex. Engineering -> Mechanical -> Materials -> Crystal Lattices -> Atomic Packing Factor) would be coloured in as you learn things in class and understand them. That way you can really see how little you know about Biology, but recognize that you have a pretty good grasp on modern materials. A basic MVP of this would literally just be turning Wikipedia into a hierarchical tree and having people check off what they know. A mock up of this idea is shown below.
So why do I enjoy working on projects so passionately, and why do I get obsessed with working on them? Because I can feel myself actually learning, and it's very fulfilling to complete a project. I'm also as stubborn as a mule and never give up. Mainly it's the process of:
1. Working towards a goal or idea
2. Running into a roadblock
3. Researching and learning to overcome a roadblock
4. Fixing the roadblock
5. Repeating until the goal is met
The main point here is that the motivation isn't learning, learning is a side effect. You might think you're motivated to learn, but that's likely not true - I mean you aren't reading textbooks because you enjoy it, right? The motivation is getting the project done. That's what you want to do. Learning happens when something blocks you from achieving your goal, and you figure it out, building critical thinking skills. In school, you are given solutions to roadblocks you don't even have so your brain doesn't think they are important. When labs and assessments come, they ask for solutions to road blocks that you may not associate with what was learned earlier. Most of the time, an assessment in school is not a roadblock, it's a goal, to pass the assessment. And with no thinking problems on modern assessments, there is no reason for students to critically think.
I see the same pattern at work that I see in my personal projects. I've found that I'm also motivated in the workplace, my passion lines up with my work and I am very lucky for that. It ends up being the same process. There's a team goal, you run into roadblocks, figure out how to fix them, learn a bit, and repeat. So why does school teach us to learn in the opposite way?
SolutionLet's move away from the traditional lecture style that's as old as history itself. Let's take some of the best experts in every subject and use the internet to extend their reach. They can provide the information that fills in the aforementioned patches, and unblock the roadblocks. Khan academy, Coursera, and even the Organic Chemistry Tutor (who does much more than organic chemistry) already do a great job of this. A lot of the students I know find out what they need to learn in class, then go online and find 3rd party content to actually understand it properly. My biggest gripe with these resources is that they function just like normal school. Hold that thought.
At the very least, schools should teach after they question. What I mean by this is instead of learning a skill and then afterwards demonstrating the skill in labs, have students get stuck on a problem (in a lab for instance) because they don't have a skill, they'll be motivated to learn it in class, then have them finish the problem.
Khan academy and other online resources are only used when students are stuck on homework, and need to overcome that. It's proof that struggle makes people want to learn.
The main concern that I hear when I pitch this is “won't students have gaps in their knowledge since they're only learning when they run into a problem?”. The answer is yes, but it won't matter. First of all, projects should be designed such that the road blocks will cover as much taught in the course as possible, ie. make almost everything a problem. This will reduce the amount of gaps and I'm confident it could exceed the current knowledge retention of students at modern educational institutes. Second of all, if the projects are big enough and comparable to those found in industry, why does it matter? If they are capable of completing the project and learning how to learn, they are better off with holes in their knowledge than having some useless knowledge they'll forget as soon as exams are over.
I think it would be really powerful if each course (or multiple courses working together) required you to work on a passion project each term, and labs were time to work on your project. In the first semester of mechatronics there is something similar to this, there is a project that bridges intro to design and Digital Computation. Each group is given a Lego mindstorms kit and they have to use a certain amount of sensors, motors, and software elements taught in class. It worked really well, I think the entire class learned more in that project than in both courses combined. Why? Because the knowledge and lessons stuck to them, their brains realized that what they learned was important. Every semester has at least 3 courses that overlap and could have a mutual project; this number could be higher if the semesters were rearranged.
If university courses had projects that resembled those found in industry, with tough challenges to overcome, students would be motivated to use the offered content to learn the material. And they would be better prepared to learn on their own to overcome tough challenges, which is what real world engineering is all about.
There's a big disconnect in between courses regarding knowledge transfer, causing a lot of unnecessary relearning. I propose a note taking app of sorts, where students slowly build a calculator of sorts for all of their courses. Take the beautiful website NandGame.com where you slowly assemble a digital logic circuit from basic building blocks. You start with relays then build gates, then arithmetic, and eventually a processor. At each stage your circuit is tested to ensure it has the correct logic. This ensures early errors don't propagate forward throughout the project. I think something similar could encompass a lot of physics courses and could connect the dots between a lot of different courses. Think NandGame combined with LeetCode but for school. Your answer would be checked thoroughly, and it could make sure you aren’t guessing and checking. Instead of solving kinematics equations by hand, you would write code of sorts to calculate the same thing and your code would be verified with many different scenarios. Then, when a future course has a kinematic element to it, you already have the supporting calculations. This would force a consistent variable naming scheme, calculation, and progress status of course progression. It would also allow courses to share content and flow into each other easier. A good example is right now in my systems modeling course (SYDE 351) we have learned how to model and solve circuits (MTE 120 and MTE220), motors (MTE 320), spring mass damper systems (MTE 202), and even thermal systems (MTE 309). In all of these cases the same or similar equations were used, and retaught. If the professor used the same conventions and equations, this course would be reduced to almost nothing since we would know all of it already. Another analog to this proposed system is how python has libraries for everything, and you rarely need to write functions from scratch. The libraries contain functions that only have to be written and understood once, and then they can be abstracted. This is a powerful practice in engineering, and heavily reduces the complexity of problems.
Final ThoughtsModern day engineering programs are so jam packed with content, it might even be required that you don’t deeply learn everything. Maybe I’m thinking of this backwards, maybe I’m not supposed to be fully learning everything. The sheer amount of content covered every semester is a lot to digest, and the students in my class that I associate with learning deeply are almost always studying. If I had to guess, I would say that by making learning more efficient, it wouldn’t take as long to deeply understand everything. But even if it did, what's more useful in the real world? A light remembrance of a ton of topics, or a deep understanding of core material?
-
Beautiful Functionality
Apr 23, 2022
Beautiful Functionality
An exercise in balance in all things design
Recently at work, I've noticed something that I hadn't really thought about prior. It is a pretty well known idea that good design is beautiful and functional. But this can be represented as a gradient, as functionality is almost always a tradeoff of beauty and vice versa. There are multiple reasons for this in different applications, but in general beautiful design is simple, and functionality is often the opposite.
It turns out (maybe obviously, but stay with me), that people fall in different places on this spectrum, and thus design to different standards of form and function. I've noticed this a lot at work, where R&D projects are pretty independent. Some people (myself included) obsess over the details, and sacrifice functionality even on R&D projects for a gorgeous, clean design. Others don't care at all and squeeze every bit of functionality out of what they create, even if it means it looks like a middle school science fair project.
Some companies and products also fall on this gradient, which makes sense because companies tend to hire people that fit the company culture. For example, Apple loves to screen for this in PD interviews (I have been put on blast for saying the magic mouse 2D profile can be defined by 3 points). Apple may be the pinnacle of sacrificing functionality for beauty, and is definitely on the far side of the spectrum. Take the magic mouse, a single 3D curved surface with no interruptions, floating above the table. It is one of the most Apple-esque products Apple has ever made, why? Because the ID team didn't want the charge port to be seen so you need to flip the mouse upside down to plug it in.
USPS mail trucks are an example of the opposite of this, pure functionality at the cost of looking absolutely stupid. The process of the truck's design is incredibly obvious. They took an existing drivetrain, tossed a tiny cabin on it, put a massive sheet metal box on the back, and covered the engine with more sheet metal. It is literally riveted together from sheet metal, no hydro forming or stamping required. The bumpers have massive rubber stoppers so that they can literally touch cars without damage. The sliding door looks like an afterthought, the windshield is completely flat, and the headlights are pulled right off a war era jeep.
It's really interesting to me that almost all of the population has their own car that's been designed to look appealing with fancy curved surfaces. Get a fender bender? You'll be replacing thousands of dollars of body work. But what if your car was riveted together from sheet metal, like the USPS truck? Well then a lot of people could fix a fender bender with tools from a hardware store. This might be an extreme example, but what about something like a rubber padded bumper (again like the USPS truck) so that you could bump into cars without causing any damage. This is incredibly useful, and I'm willing to bet if cars were all like this and a company came out with a car that didn't have it, it would be ridiculed. A product like this exists, it's called the “Bumper Beaver” and although it's ugly, it makes parking a whole lot less stressful.
So who calls the shots? Who decides what level of form and function we get in products? Well I believe it's tied to the macroeconomics of the times. People tend to prefer beautiful products when they have time and money to appreciate such things. But in hectic times such as Soviet era Russia, you bet functionality is maximized.
-
Startup Cemetery pt. 2
Mar 4, 2022
Startup Cemetery pt. 2
Some (more) ideas that I wish someone else would work on
This cemetery is themed for tools I want when I am designing things, and are more like individual products to solve some of my most common problems. I suppose a company could encompass all of these products, or they could be autonomous entities.
1. Handheld Force Gauge (March 2022)Intuition plays a huge role in being a great engineer. Engineering problems are always very underdefined and have way too many variables to just be “solved” numerically, this is where intuition steps in. Knowing which variables to lock down can really help with designing something efficiently, instead of doing tons of DOEs to find the perfect, optimal value.
One of the most least intuitive design decisions I make regularly is force measurements. I have no idea what 1 Newton feels like. The only things I can use to get a grasp for force are gravity based - that is the weight of a soda can (~0.33kg or 3.24N) or the weight of a 10lb dumbbell (~45kg or 44.5N). Then in my head I say things like “hmm, 1/8th the weight of a soda can applied to this bracket?” which is plain stupid.
Excuse my jumping to the conclusion to this problem - but I think it would be very helpful to have a handheld device with two flat sides, with a display that tells you the force applied between the two sides. This way you can easily judge based off intuition if 3N is enough preload for a bearing, or something else like that. Obviously our intuition starts to die off for heavy things (for example, you have no perception of how much a rocket ship weighs, there is nothing you can compare or get a feel for) but I still think this is very useful for small things.
2. True Size 3D Display (June 2021)Another problem I have when designing is not realizing how big or small the thing I am designing is. This is a large problem at Neuralink where some of the parts are ridiculously small or big, but on a monitor screen they all look the same size.
Again I know I am jumping to conclusions on the solution to this problem, but I think a volumetric display could really help show what you are designing in real time, in life size. This could be as simple as 3 screens mounted perpendicular to each other (for front, top, and side views) and could get as complicated as proper volumetric displays.
Another interesting thought is some way of very rapidly making parts, like 3D printing but orders of magnitude faster. Maybe theres some solution using foam or something where you could print a mock up design and have it in seconds, allowing you to iterate extremely fast on the general geometry of the part, without the correct material properties.
3. Auto Populating Calipers (July 2019)Before talking about this idea I should give credit where credit is due. I had this original idea in July 2019, but refined it with my friend Ethan Childerhose who then used it for a hackathon project with his 3 friends over a year later. They won Most Novel hack at Hack the 6ix and were awarded $10k in startup funding if they wanted to pursue it, but sadly they didn’t want to.
I have always found it slightly annoying to measure something with calipers, and then slightly adjust to see the measurement and write it down, all the while trying desperately to hold them tight and not move them. I thought it would be cool to hit a button on the calipers and have they work as an HID device to type into a text box or a spreadsheet or something. This way the exact value is populated and saved digitally. You could even remove the screen from the calipers and make them much slimmer, allowing them to be more versatile.
-
I Hate Cooking
Feb 13, 2022
I Hate Cooking
And I wish I didn't have to think about it
As a university student with little free time it probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that I have never gained the appreciation for cooking a nice meal, nevertheless becoming good at cooking. I also have a low attention span, and a need to be hyper productive. It takes 20 minutes for the rice to cook? Well you can find me back at my desk working on something - and the pot will almost surely boil over every single time.
I have had a dream for a while about a smart kitchen assistant based around the stove top (where most of the fuck-ups happen). The MVP is a device that can set timers, check temperatures and guide you through a recipe. Adding on to this, some nice to have features would be: boil over/burning detection, cooked thoroughly estimation, temperature recommendations (turn the stove down it's too hot), portioning estimation (“this is too much rice for 4 people”), integration with other smart kitchen appliances (automatic stove top dials, automatic rice cooker, smart fridge shopping list, etc.).
Essentially, the MVP should be able to prevent me from burning my steaks and leaving the rice to boil for too long. Nice to have features as listed above would allow for “guided cooking” where all the risky parts of the recipe are being monitored by an agent that doesn’t get tired of staring at a pan.
The closest thing I have found to this is the GE Kitchen Hub (which is pretty much just an iPad on a range hood, it doesn’t even interact with the food at all, just brings up recipes) and Domino’s DOM AI which scans pizzas before they go out for delivery.
I want to pursue this, but don’t have the free time or energy currently. I am hoping writing this and making my idea public will encourage me to get to work.
-
YYZ-SFO (by car)
Jan 10, 2022
YYZ-SFO (by car)
Road trip from Mississauga to Palo Alto
For my upcoming internship at Neuralink (in Fremont) I wanted to live with my friends who work in Mountain View, and didn’t want to live in Fremont. I also wanted to have the ability to explore more of California with a car. I compared the options of buying a car in California, renting a car in California, shipping a car from Canada, and buying and driving a car down from Canada. I ended up buying a car and driving it over 5000km with my brother across the United States. It was an amazing experience and cool to see parts of the US day by day. The route I took is above, I was forced to enter California through the south because the week before this, Tahoe got over 16 feet of snow, closing the mountain passes and I-80.
Day 1Mississauga ON -> Indianapolis IN
The night before the trip, it snowed about 3 inches and we were leaving before the plows had a chance to clear the road. In my front wheel drive car this was not fun - but luckily I had winter tires. As soon as we made it into the USA the roads were clear and we flew straight to Indianapolis.
Day 2Indianapolis IN -> Tulsa OK
We woke up bright and early ready for a boring drive, did a circle around the city and booked it to St. Louis MO. We had lunch at the arc, toured the city, and then got back on the interstate to Tulsa. Google Maps directed us down some farm roads for half of it where we saw no one else on the perfectly straight road for hours. When we pulled into the hotel I instantly got a bad feeling about the area, and realized we probably should’ve checked crime statistics. Lots of abandoned buildings, cars and sketchy behavior.
Day 3Tulsa OK -> Santa Rosa NM
From this point on we decided to start checking crime statistics to avoid booking hotels in sketchy areas. The original plan was to stay in Albuquerque NM, but after looking to up we didn’t want to risk staying in a bad area. Instead we stayed in the small city of Santa Rosa which was beautiful, and had a hidden surprise. In the morning we saw a ton of signs for “Blue Hole” and after following them we found a beautiful blue “lake” that appeared to keep going deeper and deeper.
Day 4Santa Rosa NM -> Grand Canyon Junction AZ
On day 3 we planned to make it to a town just outside of the Grand Canyon, passing through Flagstaff AZ. When I asked my friend from Arizona what we should see he just recommended Oregano's Pizza, and yes, it lived up to expectations as being the primary attraction of Flagstaff (just kidding). The mountains and roads through the snowy forests were amazing, and the sunset was definitely the *second* best on the entire trip.
Day 5Grand Canyon Junction AZ -> Las Vegas NV
When we woke up on day 5, we went straight for the Grand Canyon at 6am to catch the sunrise. We didn’t think it through all the way and it was pretty sad since we were looking at the Canyon from the East side (it was just dark!). Once it got bright out though it was mind blowing - I have never seen a more extreme setting.
We never planned to stay over in Las Vegas, just to pass through, but my parents were insistent on us stopping for the experience. On the way, we stopped at the Hoover Dam, and a hotel to visit Matician (a company I previously interned at) who was demoing their robots near the CES venue. It was very busy (mostly due to CES) and it was very hard to find a hotel that would accept 2 kids both <21. Eventually we found a place, went out for dinner, and walked the strip.
Day 6Las Vegas NV -> Bakersfield CA
After leaving Vegas my car dashboard lit up like a Christmas Tree, after noticing that my “change oil” sticker was 180km ago I realized that we screwed up by choosing a longer route that was literally longer than my oil life. We decided to ignore the oil warnings (we were doing all highway driving, so light on the engine) and continue into Death Valley (arguably a risky idea). It was insane to me that 2 days ago we were driving through a snowy forest and now we're driving through the hottest place on earth. After seeing some highlight spots (Badwater Basin, Artist's Palette, and Mesquite Sand Dunes) we continued through the mountains. We would have to drive down an extremely narrow and windy road on the edge of a cliff, at night, in what would be the scariest stretch of the trip. When we pulled into our hotel in Bakersfield we were both exhausted and passed out early.
Day 7Bakersfield CA -> Palo Alto CA
From Bakersfield to Palo Alto is not a very long stretch, so we decided to take the PCH 1 for as long as we could. We went from Pismo Beach all the way up to Half Moon Bay, driving by the Pacific the entire time. It was the most beautiful stretch of road I have ever driven on; and maybe ever will. When we reached Half Moon Bay the sun was setting, and it was definitely an amazing way to end the trip. All that was left was a twisty dizzying ride through the Santa Cruz mountains to get to my new home.
-
What's the Best Way to Wakeup?
Jan 3, 2022
What's the Best Way to Wakeup?
A proof for the need of a better al*rm clock
In a series of blog posts about product visions I have, I want to prove the need and usefulness of products using first principles. First principles might be a bit liberal - I’d call it more of a logical deduction, but that being said I think it speaks to the need for these products to solve problems.
A problem that's always bothered me (as well as other people from what I’ve been told) is waking up in the morning. Currently, hundreds of millions (probably billions) of people around the world have Apples “Radar” alarm permanently ingrained into their brain - you know what I’m talking about. The fact that we force our brains out of sleep cycle with a vexatious alarm literally named “Radar” is not right, and it's something I would like to fix.
If we think about how cave men and even animals wakeup, it is purely based on a daylight cycle, and doesn’t involve alarms at all. Daylight is subtle enough that it will only wake you up when you’re in a light, easy to wake state.
It is widely known that it is best to wake up in a light sleep state, and after a REM period. Studies from sleep scientists including Matthew Walker and Andrew Huberman show that it is more beneficial to your sleep cycle to wake up during these times, as opposed to waking up after exactly X amount of hours. To do this properly, a wakeup signal needs to be just disturbing enough to wake you up in a light state, but not in a REM or deep state.
In addition to this, light has been shown to be very important to the wakeup cycle. Andrew Huberman suggests daylight every morning, quoted as saying “If sunlight reaches your eyes soon after you wake, it triggers a neural circuit that controls the timing of the hormones cortisol and melatonin, which affect sleep”. I believe that waking up to an alarm sound is extremely bad for your wake up cycle, and I can personally say that obnoxious noises just cause headaches, and eventually you just get used to ignoring them.
This is why I decided to build Kurt. Kurt is a curtain opener that makes smart, informed decisions about your sleep cycle to wake you up with natural light and calming noises. Unlike current robotic curtain openers, Kurt is first an al*rm clock, and second a smart home appliance. Kurt can only open your blinds, not close them. This is on purpose, manually closing your blinds sends an automatic signal to Kurt to let it know you are going to sleep soon. From that point, your desired sleep time is measured, after which your curtains are opened and you can wake up peacefully.
I do not have the bandwidth to turn this into a product, but I do think it could be an interesting business venture. Check out the Kurt website under my project section.
-
Startup Cemetery pt. 1
Dec 6, 2021
Startup Cemetery pt. 1
Some ideas that I wish someone else would work on
The reason this list exists is that I have noticed I see a lot of startups where my first thought is: “I had that idea 2 years ago!” but I never keep the receipts. I also want to start cutting ties with old ideas to force myself into fresh ones. So here it is, free ideas that I will personally never see through, but would love to see come to life! I hope they don’t sound too insane.
1. A way to sell ideas (February 2021)Now I know what you’re thinking - Clayton, you’re giving these ideas away for free, how would you possibly put a price on an idea? Well, I have no idea! But ideas have value, some startups even choose to hide their ideas from the general public, in fear that it may be ripped off. Oftentimes by joining an early phase startup, you are investing yourself in the idea itself, not necessarily the company or the people it is made up of.
I personally think that a lot of people have great startup ideas but don’t have the time or resources to execute on them, so spreading them around to people with time and resources would be a win-win scenario.
I have thought of one implementation of how this could work - but I am sure someone else can come up with something better. Imagine a website like Product Hunt, but creators could be “vetted” and charge for their ideas. You wouldn’t be able to see the full idea until you pay, but you would be able to see the general genre or topic of the idea. Secondary people could be paid to evaluate and rate the ideas, but sign an agreement saying they won’t pursue anything they see on the website. That way, if some wannabe founders want to do, say, some solar power energy company, they can find ideas related to solar power, buy them up, and decide where to go from there.
2. Grocery stores built around recipes (April 2020)I believe there should be a grocery service where you order recipes, not groceries. And I think the current trend of food delivery can greatly set this up for success.
I have always found it really silly that we buy ingredients to make recipes, and that in your fridge at any given time, there is almost certainly leftover ingredients from a recipe you were following that you will never use again. Sure there are staples that every kitchen pantry/fridge should have, sugar, salt, rice, etc. But for the most part, recipes create additional food waste.
Another trend that is getting closer to this, is realizing that grocery delivery can actually be more environmentally friendly. Services like Voilà have one delivery van that can cover maybe 10-20 houses worth of food, avoiding those 10-20 drivers from individually driving to the store, shopping, and driving back. In the future, it will be very uncommon to go to a grocery store, instead your essentials will be delivered to you.
So now imagine a service where you can order 4 servings of cedar planked salmon, and 8 servings of french onion soup. All the ingredients would be portioned such that you shouldn’t have any waste at the end. And since the grocery stores can now share ingredients across different recipes, they should also be able to minimize waste.
I suppose services like HelloFresh are similar to this, but there are two problems with it. The first is that you are forced to select from their weekly menu, greatly limiting the customer base. The second is how expensive it is. If you were to copy the recipes and pro rate those ingredients at the grocery store I guarantee it would be >50% less money. Yes, it includes delivery, but by using a bulk delivery van system similar to Amazon Prime I think this cost could be greatly reduced.
3. Customizable multi tools (2014)When I was in middle school I was really into EDC, or every day carry. It's essentially all about carrying essential tools daily with you. Typically, this includes some sort of knife or multitool like a swiss army knife or a leatherman. The problem I have with these two companies is that they have models with a set amount of tools. So if you specifically need scissors, a file, and a phillips screwdriver, you might be stuck with a huge tool with a bunch of other useless stuff, or they may not even have an option for you.
In grade 7, after looking at how swiss army knives work, I realized that all the tools are essentially the same. They use the same spring-cam mechanism, and have one of two form factors - full length or half length. My idea was to have a multitool with an expandable frame, so that you could add or remove tools yourself, and sell the tools separately. This way you buy the frame, the tools you want, and assemble your own multitool. As the seasons change or your daily job changes, you could switch the tools out. After getting quotes from suppliers in China to make tool samples I gave up - grade 7 me could not afford tool and die costs.
-
A Table for One
Sep 5, 2021
Alone in California During a Pandemic
Weekly recount of my trip to California over Summer 2021
Part of my criteria for finding a summer internship in 2021 was that it was in person. As a generally mechanical engineering focused person, I believe it is very important to work hands on. Sadly during this time Canada was going through a strenuous time with COVID-19, with vaccine shortages, strict lockdowns and the rumoured third wave. This made it really hard to find an in person internship. Luckily, since I was now a second year student, I got a few job offers in California. I ended up accepting an offer to work at Matician, in Palo Alto. Matician is building autonomous robots to help people, something that I align with perfectly.
Flying to California during a pandemic was really interesting, planes were surprisingly packed yet airports were eerily empty. At my layover in Vancouver (YVR), I was on one of 4 non-domestic flights the entire day. The second day after I landed I already had my first vaccine shot, something that wouldn’t have happened in Canada for another few months. Despite all that I’ve been told about the American healthcare system, that was pretty sweet.
Since I was a kid I have always wanted to travel to the valley, but my family has really only travelled on the east coast. Every week I tried to get out and try something new, and I documented that in this rather large blog post.
Week 1A big portion of my first week was just getting moved in, figuring out where to get food and getting comfortable with my commute and my neighborhood. I rented a house with 5 other Matician interns, although it was only me and 2 other guys for the first month. In my first few days before work started, I went to Battery Yates, Fishermans Wharf, Stanford, Shoreline Park, and downtown Palo Alto. I also got vaccinated, got a bank account, applied for a Social Security Number and all the other fun intern errands. My first week at work went by super quickly, in my first couple of days I started catching up and getting familiarized with the team and the work that needed to be done. I was assigned my first project on my third day at work, one which would involve weeks of DOEs, prototypes, and brainstorming to finish.
Week 2On the weekend after my first week I made it to San Francisco and met up with a friend from Waterloo I hadn’t seen in years. The city felt a lot like a fever dream, the roads slanting up at dizzying angles reminded me of that one scene from Inception. We walked around the mission district and Soma. The next day I biked through the Googleplex, Shoreline Park, and NASA Ames.
Week 3I finally wrapped up my first project at the end of this week, and got assigned a really big open ended project going forward. I also had the opportunity to go surfing in Santa Cruz with a family friend who lives nearby on the weekend. I had gone before and was pretty comfortable with standing on the board, so it wasn’t too hard to pick it up again. It was crazy how many people were there, sitting on boards, waiting for the perfect wave. Sadly I didn’t get any pictures of me on the surfboard! After my second week at work I had gotten suggestions to go to Pinnacles National Park, and so the next day, my two roommates and I drove almost 2 hours south to the park. The hike was incredible; at one point going up super steep steps carved into a cliff face. Pinnacles is one of the few places on earth you can see condors, the largest flying bird in North America. We saw multiple, and near the top of the hike there was one perched not 20 feet away from us.
Week 4At the end of May we had 4 days off, and some of the interns had joked around the idea of going sailing at Shoreline Park, but only 3 of us (including me) knew how to sail. The tricky part was that the skippers of the sail boats would have to pass a test. Luckily everyone passed, and we ended up having a great time. The day after I biked through foothills park, and saw Tesla’s HQ. On Saturday of that week I made it back up to San Francisco, this time to check out Haight Ashbury and Golden Gate Park. A lot of my family is named after the neighborhood so it was pretty special to me to be there. Sadly at the intersection of Clayton & Haight there wasn’t a sign with both street names. On Sunday I got the chance to see Muir Woods with some friends working at Tesla. It was shocking to walk through the massive trees, feeling like an ant. We hiked up a hill and made it up above the treeline, some odd 400 feet off the base of the forest.
Week 5For some reason I got the genius idea of going biking up the Santa Cruz mountains with some coworkers. When they showed up with their super fancy bikes and aerodynamic clothing I knew I had screwed up. I showed up in khaki shorts and a t-shirt, and a heavy backpack - bad idea. By the time we had biked 10 miles to the base of the climb, I was already exhausted and had to stay behind. After resting for a bit I decided to go as far as I could up the hill, before turning around a racing back down. Apparently this road is pretty popular with road bikers, and sure thing there were hundreds all trying to make it to the top. The next day I could barely walk, and decided it would be best to relax.
Week 6After work on Friday I biked south to San Jose to have dinner with another friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. It's funny to me how surprisingly easy it is to find people from Waterloo here. On Saturday I biked from my house to Apple Park, Nvidia HQ, and Samsungs Research Center to take pictures for friends working there remotely. On Sunday I went to the SF Zoo, Fort Funston, and San Tung’s (which was recommended to me countless times).
Week 7I really wanted to see more of the Pacific and the Bridge on the weekend, so I started at Sutro Baths, hiked through Lands End, and walked along Bakers Beach all the way to the Golden Gate. I still had time in the day and walked through Crissy Field Beach, saw the Palace of Fine Arts, climbed Lyons Street Steps and then got on a bike and made it to Coit Tower. The views this day were incredible, and I am still surprised by how far I made it on foot. I spent Sunday relaxing and doing some user testing of a prototype from work.
Week 8I didn’t realize how close I was living to Mission Peak, and this week myself and two of my roommates were determined to climb it. We drove to the base and started climbing before quickly realizing we should’ve brought more water. But despite dehydration, we made it to the top relatively quickly and admired the view for a long time. We took the “less travelled path” on the way down, which was arguably more difficult than the way up. On Sunday all six of us living at the house had tickets booked to go to Alcatraz, so we dove to Pier 33 and took a ferry to the island. It was very spooky in a way that is hard to convey; knowing that some of the most dangerous people alive were locked up on an isolated island right next to a metropolis.
Week 9Despite coming up on July 4th, I had a pretty laid back week. I wrapped up my biggest project at work, and started working on a smaller one, that actually had an end in sight and wasn’t so open ended. I really took parkinson's law to heart on my previous project, being extremely thorough and careful with my decisions. On the Friday of the long weekend I went to downtown Mountain View, got lunch delivered by a Starship robot, and biked to Redwood Grove Nature Preserve. On Saturday I spent most of the day working on UW FSAE work, integrating a lot of my projects into the full vehicle model (my experience on UW FSAE can be seen on my projects page). On Sunday July 4th I went to San Francisco, checked out Mission Dolores park (which was packed), met up with some old friends, and watched the firework show at Aquatic Park.
Week 10This week was like any other at work, it felt good making progress on a new project. On the weekend I biked to Stanford, jogged the Stanford Dish hike, and biked through some parks. And, like the previous week, I had quite a bit of UW FSAE work to get through, so I took a break from exploring on Sunday to be more productive.
Week 11This week we had picture day at work, in front of a lovely background of Prusa printers. On Saturday I started a new book, and relaxed all day. On Sunday I met up with a friend in San Francisco for brunch in the Dog Patch. I learned the hard way that milk and sugar in coffee is a cardinal sin at trendy coffee places. We ended up checking out the Chase Center, and walking all the way into SoMa.
Week 12Ended up spending a good portion of this week on a seemingly simple root cause analysis, but something extremely strange was happening, and no one seemed to know how to get to the bottom of the problem. On Friday we had a company launch party for our next generation prototype at Spark Social in SF. I got to know some coworkers better on a more personal level, and had lots of fun considering it was a company event! After the party a couple of us walked down to the Chase Center for a stand up comedy show. The next day I met up with a friend from Waterloo. We got lunch at the farmers market on California Avenue, and walked through Stanford University. After that I biked to Byxbee park and saw way too many birds, like seriously, how can that many birds live in the same park?
Week 13A friend from Waterloo who was working in Palo Alto remotely came down to meet his coworkers and see the office in person, and I showed him around the city that was still new to me. We rented bikes and went across the entire coast line up until Bakers beach, then cut through the city through some cool neighborhoods.
Week 14This week at work I took on a really ambitious project, to redesign the company's first few parts for injection molding. When I started this I thought it would just be a quick project, but I really underestimated the time it takes to work with manufacturers and come up with a design both parties are happy with. I ended up needing more than the 50 hours I had already spent during the week, so I worked over the weekend too. I really wanted to make sure these parts got made before I left.
Week 15During the work week I just kept grinding away at my DFM project, I was slowly getting closer to something I was happy with and the manufacturer was starting to understand our constraints. I worked extra hard during the week in anticipation for a friend visiting the next couple days. She arrived on Saturday and stayed in Mountain View for the night. On Sunday we headed to SF to stay at a hotel for the rest of her stay. We explored Dolores Park, Golden Gate Park, and its Japanese tea garden. I have to give a shoutout to Kuma Sushi in the city for some amazing sashimi and a really awesome environment.
Week 16I took Monday and Tuesday off to explore SF more with my friend. On Monday we went to all the Golden Gate bridge lookouts, Pier 39, and went on a ferry ride around some islands. On Tuesday we did some shopping, went to the Castro, and took some pictures at Haight Ashbury. Early the next day she flew home and I went back to work. I had received some early samples of some parts from our injection molding vendor that allowed me to do some material testing, and make some more educated design decisions. On the weekend, myself and some coworkers planned to go camping in Stanislaus National Forest but sadly it was too smokey and wouldn’t have been enjoyable. Instead, we decided to do a long 16km hike up Mount Tamalpais. After the hike on our drive home, it just so happened that we were at the right time and place; the fog was rolling in over the ridges of the mountain right at sunset, which was incredibly beautiful.
Week 17In my last week in California, I wrapped up my project and validated sample parts from our vendor. And after work one day my friend from when I did competitive swimming (over a decade ago) came to visit on a road trip from LA to Yosemite to SF. Sadly, as soon as we stopped at our first sight seeing place, Fort Funston, her rental car got broken into and a good portion of my personal stuff got stolen. I learned my lesson the hard way! I had assumed that a conservancy park far from the city would be safe from break ins, but I guess not. On the weekend I packed up all my stuff, sold the stuff I couldn’t bring with me, and did some final exploring in San Bruno.
Week 18Early Monday morning I flew to Vancouver, and then took a small plane to Castlegar BC where I met up with my family for a wedding. A lot of my family lives in British Columbia and Alberta, and the wedding was happening in Canmore Alberta. We had a few days to hike in Nelson, Radium Springs, and Kootenay. My favourite hike was to Stanley Glacier, where the main path stops about half way up to the actual glacier, but some small trails actually bring you up to the ice. The wedding in Canmore was amazing, tucked within mountains and with family I hadn’t seen in many years. The day after the wedding party we did an e-bike ride around Canmore, down the Bow river. After some more hiking I finally flew home, after being away from my family and friends for 4 months I am glad to be back.
-
UW Bridge Competition
March 12, 2021
UW Bridge Competition
My design process in a class wide bridge building competition
As part of my Mechanics of Deformable Solids (MODS) course we had to design and build a truss bridge using things we learned in class. This project was done in groups of 3 and was worth a significant amount of our final mark. Most of the mark was based on how your bridge performed in a competition with the rest of the class, with the success metric being the weight it held divided by the weight of the bridge.
I took the initiative to do the design portion of the project and started laying out requirements and goals for the project. The bridge had to span a 40cm gap, be no taller than 10cm, no wider than 8cm, and be loaded in the center of the bridge. We were limited to using laser-cut balsa wood and hardwood dowels for the pin joints.
To start the design I thought about some typical truss bridge shapes and layouts, but after some pondering I determined that minimizing the amount of members would be beneficial. This is because with more members, the chances of one having a weak point or a tolerance issue and being a “weak link” would be detrimental. From this I came up with two bridge designs, shown below.
I ended up picking the 7 member truss since Euler's critical buckling load gets smaller with 1/L², and the 3 member truss has a much longer compression members. We knew we wanted to break last year's record of 598 g/g, so we aimed for a score of 700. From here, using an estimated bridge weight an approximate load can be calculated. I then used formulas to optimize the design, ensuring all failure modes would meet or exceed the load goal. I also used empirical testing with my team members on some test pieces we got cut. This was used to verify material properties and formula estimations. For example, to optimize the width of the members under compression I determined what fraction of the load they took, and used basic formulas to determine a thickness. We then tested those members under tension to see if they met the estimation, which they did. An analysis of the material properties can be seen below.
From here we got our bridge manufactured and tested it. We saw something that we didn’t predict happening; the bridge was twisting and shifting as we added more weight. It only made it to a score of 380, which was not up to our standards. We caught it on video and analyzed it to improve our next iteration (seen below).
To reduce the twisting we added cross members and hole supports to make the holes longer. After testing it, it successfully reached a score of 600 before twisting itself to pieces yet again. Our final iteration was the one we had to submit, no more testing, so we added even more twisting supports and handed it in hoping for the best.
Despite a really poor video quality, our bridge looked like it just kept taking more and more weight. It successfully broke the record and came 1st in the class. The final PV ratio was 649, breaking at 10kg and weighing a mere 15.4 grams. Despite not meeting the designed goal of 700, I am still proud of our team and the outcome of the competition.
A render of the final design can be seen below, with cross members, twisting supports and T-beam compression members.
-
Old Chords
Oct 3, 2020
Old Chords
Projects that just didn't make the cut
When I was in elementary school, I was teaching myself basic electronics principles, components and circuits. Going into middle school I started trying to apply this knowledge, trying to make a go-cart, small “robots” and other similar things. When I got into microcontrollers in grade 6, my passion for tinkering really took off, because now I could program my projects and add so much more value to them. In grade 7 after some Arduino experience, I built my first decent project, a pair of smart glasses with a TFT screen and voice control (pictured below).
Now I never said I was good at making things look professional, but it still impressed people, making it to reporters at Makezine, Time, and the Discovery channel. With this media attention, it caught the eyes of the Glass division at Google, who sent me a gift package in the mail which made 13 year old me really happy.
The next year I wanted to try making one of my dream projects come to life, I wanted to make a full-body exoskeleton capable of giving me extra strength and speed. Maybe that was too much of an ambitious goal for a 15-year-old... Despite the massive challenge this would pose, I went to work designing, 3D printing and prototyping parts for it. Realizing that this would end up costing a lot of money, I launched the project on Kickstarter, offering some rewards for people that helped out. The project was funded successfully, allowing me to buy some of the expensive equipment and components necessary.
I learned so much doing this project and some really valuable lessons that helped me become the person I am today. I realize, looking back, that it was extremely sketchy, and so many things were done wrong. But I am glad it went that way because I learned so much.
One of the most interesting things I developed for the project was a super light, powerful and compliant actuator. This “air muscle” was constructed with a soft, flexible tube that when pressurized would expand, pulling a braided sleeve and contracting (pictured below). Another thing I tried to do was to make the exoskeleton take all the weight off of the legs, which didn’t end up working well, but the principles were there. This was done with over-center locking mechanisms, extending from the “spine” to the knees, allowing a load on the back to be transferred directly to the feet (pictured below).
-
Welcome to my Website
Sep 18, 2020
Welcome to my Website
A place to post projects, experiences, and ideas
After applying for jobs in my 1B school term, in the summer of 2020, I realized that having an easy to access portfolio could really help me. Before this website, I would just hope that employers and recruiters would see the little “see portfolio” note on my resume. But now it's easy to provide a link to my website where people can see my experience, projects and well, this blog.
At the end of the term, I was watching some videos on HTML and CSS to try and learn some basic skills. Once I got the basics down, I drafted the look of this website in Figma and translated that into HTML and CSS. The hardest part for me was writing all the content, consolidating all my projects, and making sure they all had enough pictures and renders.
I learned a lot of skills from this project, and maybe one day I will improve the website since it is still in its first draft. I hope to keep it updated with blog posts, job experience and any new projects I do.