Projects

During my time at ATCO EnPower, I helped develop many different tools to help improve workflows such as creating fault tolerant servers and a dashboarding software but in particular I helped automate many different spreadsheets. Each of these spreadsheets required an aspect of manual entries that were both time consuming and inconvinient. In particular the water report was a project made the largest positive impact. 

The Problem

The Water Report is filled out each month by operators at one of EnPower's renewable sites for Operations Technology to monitor and track various metrics to ensure consitancy and reliability. The problem was that the spreadsheet could only be filled in manually which involved travelling from a particular computer using an outdated software to a newer computer. This process was taking 4-6 hours per month to fill out each piece of information in this sheet. 

The Task

I was tasked with figuring out a way to automate the spreadsheet to take less time to fill. Also instead of using the outdated system to get the values there were now pi tags in place where the old system was. However as a side task I had to find each of the missing pi tags in order for a pi specialist to make them.

The Solution

Using over 30 pi tags and various excel macros I automated the report to fill all the numbers automatically using numbers from Pi with the push of a button. This automation changed the time to fill in the monthly talies from 4-6 hours to exactly 2.6 seconds to fill the data for the entire month. If you combine the previous time it took to fill the sheet, this change saved operators around two weeks of the year of strait manual entries. 

This automation not only saved time and money but made the lives of the operators easier and made the entire process foolproof for the future.

My Mecanum Wheeled Vehicle project was based on some reaserch I had been doing on theme park rides. I was increadibly interested on how ride vehicles were able to turn without needing to turn the front wheel allowing for quick turns at almost any instance. That is when I came across mecanum wheels. When I saw the mecanum wheels I immediately wanted to develop a theme park esque ride. 

Preliminary Model

Before I began building I began coming up with preliminary designs. This design fostered a flat rectangular body with round ends of the vehicle body. This design housed a very large passenger section with space for motors within the round ends. There were a couple iterations of model but even as the scale increased and the passanger space shrank, the preliminary model did not suffice to fit all of the materials needed without the need to exponentially expand its size which caused me to pivot to the model 

During my Co-op at StumpCraft I made many different proposals proposing updates to many outdated workflows that were bottlenecking the production line. However the Custom Puzzle Automation is the most successful workflow revision I worked on.

Previous Workflow

Before my revision, the Stumpcraft Custom Puzzle making process involved various people individually pulling the images being used as the custom puzzles from shopify. After getting the images they had to rename each image a specific name and put it in dropbox. Then they had to individually make lables and inserts for each custom puzzle and rename each of those to specific names. Each month these custom puzzles cost people days of work to make and rename the pictures, images, and inserts. I thought it was a crazy waste of time so I developed an automated flow that does most of the work for the person.

Revised Workflow

To fix the time of this workflow I automated the pulling of images and image names into a google sheet. In the google sheet I was able to sort the images by name and make names for pictures, labels, and inserts. Then using the picture names in the sheet and over 800 lines of C++ code I was able to rename every image to have the correct image title and put them in the correct folder in shopify. Then I bulk upload the sheet into a Canva template which makes all the labels and inserts in a matter of seconds. My revised workflow saved weeks of work throughout the year!