Club Projects
Club Projects
Embedded Files
In the Spring of 2024, I helped in the founding of Badgers in Themed Entertainment (BiTE), an engineering student organization at UW-Madison. In just a short time, we were able to grow our group to over 40 members, all dedicated to the themed entertainment industry.
Founding this organization was an incredible feat, and I hope the club will carry on with its proejcts in the future!
Bucky's Blast Off
Bucky's Blast Off
Our very first club project was a dedication to the city of Madison. Powered by a bike pump, our pneumatic-launch demonstration was a great way to get kids excited about engineering, while I was learning more about engineering, and how to lead a student org.
Personally, I helped out with a lot of the scenery and decorations, as well as designing the ride vehicle. For our presentation at Engineering Expo, I designed and created our club shirts for our team members.
Final Project
Engineering Expo with Bucky!
Dark Ride Project
Dark Ride Project
This year, we designed a model dark ride. Filled with animatronics, lights, and set pieces, this is our biggest project yet! Personally, I am taking on many subtasks for this project and have learned a great deal. I am excited to contitue on this project next year to add and improve to the scenes!
Design and Scenery
Design and Scenery
I designed the box early first semester, split into 6 sections each 2 ft x 3 ft, there are a total of 5 different rooms for the ride vehicle to traverse throguh. The colored blocks are where we expect show elements to be spaced, and this design overall has helped us visualize the project at a low fidelity scale.
As our team split up to work on different components, I was able to add some decorative elements to the boxes. painting the walls and ground to feel more immersive, as well as sculpting some elements from clay, this scenery will really help pull everything together. I also designed a coral structure and assembled it using a foam board, covered in paper mache and clay to give a coral texture. Moving corals were created using a spherical gear system and twisted spirals, meticulously arranged to give a 'flowing' illusion. In the darker areas of the undersea adventure, I designed an array of fish to be laser cut out, and with the help of LEDs, give a beautiful show of sea creatures.
Animatronic Jellyfish
Animatronic Jellyfish
Animatronic Jellyfish was my next task for the project. Hopeing to be relatively small, I designed an umbrella-liek mechanism with a few parts to 3D prints and some to laser cut. With keeping a simple base and adding movement through a motor, I hope to make the jellyfish come to life with a pink sheer fabric and some ribbon to simulate the tentacles. The motion of them was all coded in C++ and transferred to servo motors via an arduino
Octopus Arms
Octopus Arms
Lastly, and most importantly, I had the opportunity to work on our showstopper animatronic: the octopus. Positioned in our final scene, this centerpiece is designed to serve as a striking focal point amid a sea of celebrating fish. My mission was to create a figure with fluid, lifelike movement using limited resources and parts, presenting quite a few engineering challenges.
My base idea was to design thin, flexible joints between 3D-printed segments, allowing the model to bend at specific intersections and greatly simplifying the overall figure. From a test model, I ran extensive calculations and re-prints to achieve the desired range of motion while maintaining structural rigidity. The thin joints proved difficult to print, and even successful prints were incredibly brittle. After many iterations, I finally arrived at a working solution: double walled joints printed at a slightly reduced layer height. Two factors proved critical to preserving a reliable living hinge: ensuring each layer started and ended within the body of the part rather than at the hinge location, and activating the hinge while the plastic was still warm. The moment a part finished printing, I removed it from the bed and carefully flexed each joint in both directions. Once fully cooled, the hinges remained flexible and the result looked fantastic.
With the hinge mechanism solved, I turned to aesthetics and making the assembly actually look like a tentacle. Designed in Onshape, the shape came together relatively quickly. A bracket and pulley were added at the end to guide the string running through the length of the tentacle. By wrapping the string in opposite directions, the tentacle achieves a beautifully organic, sweeping motion, all driven by a single motor. This paired pretty well with one of my team members octopus body, and overall gave a great effect for our final scene, which will be refined even more next year!
Logos and Designs
Logos and Designs
Starting a club means coming up with a Brand Identity. The main idea was to keep our logos and designs fun and playful, while representing themed entertainment. Here are a few of the fun designs I made over the past couple of years!
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