2.009

In 2.009, the capstone design course of MIT's undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum, teams of 16 to 20 people were organized to develop functional prototypes for products around a central theme. In the year I took the class, the theme of the class was "Be Well!", and teams came up with various ideas to improve the wellness of life in various areas.

Our product, Poseidon, allows swimmers to pace themselves real-time in the pool using a laser beam that sweeps across the pool lane at a user-defined speed, much like the constantly advancing line that one sees on television broadcasts of the swimming events in the Olympics. The key challenges we faced in developing the product included ensuring that the enclosure was waterproof, that it could be mounted to the walls of different pools, and that a single battery was able to power all of the components of the device, including the laser, a galvanometer-based mirror that sweeps the laser, and the microcontroller that powers the screen and controls the mirror.