Student Feature - Up & Coming Engineer
Back to Table of Contents
Meet another young engineer Sade Brown by Howard Bussey
How many iterations do your projects go through? Whether they be design or implementation iterations, most projects have several iterations. Sade (pronounced shah-DAY) Brown, a student at Greece Athena High School, has already learned the value of iterative design and construction. Her eighth grade project was a robotic hand model, built with cardboard. Strings connected the fingers to the motors, and a small micro-controller board controlled the motors. This helped her understand the processes of gripping and releasing. She changed the approach the next year, when she used Lego Mindstorms components to control a gripper, raise and lower the gripper, and rotate the gripper arm around an axis. She demonstrated how it could move objects – a small bag and a plastic spoon – from one spot to another programmatically. Her program had to control the three motors, and then position the arm and gripper for the next task. Last year, she investigated a different design that could perform those tasks in a different way – allowing the gripper to reach out so that objects could be grasped when they were nearer or further from the arm’s central axis. She hoped to be able to use 3-D printing to build the arm, but the COVID-19 pandemic postponed that goal. Sade entered all of these projects in the Terra Rochester Finger Lakes
Figure 1. Sade’s project has a cardboard hand with finger movements actuated by motors and strings and controlled by a microcontroller.
18 | The ROCHESTER ENGINEER FEBRUARY 2022
res student feature - up & coming engineer
