IEEE Southeastcon 2020

Preparations for the Pi day

In the fall of 2019, my freshman year, I joined the USF's team for IEEE Southeastcon student hardware competition. IEEE Southeastcon is an yearly regional conference that happens in the month of March. A special feature of the conference is the student competition that occurs in various sub-categories. My primary focus was on the Hardware competition, and so I joined a group of ~10 engineering students preparing for it, through the IEEE chapter at USF.

The task proposed by the Southeastcon committee for the 2020 competition was to build a robot which could move around in an arena of colored boxes, pick the pre-determined box, and stack the boxes at the end in a given order. The order of the stacked boxes were determined by the digits of pi, basically each digit from 0-9 was given a color code. Higher the stack in a given amount of time, higher the digits of pi represented, better the chances of winning. The judgement was based on 2 factors, accuracy and number of blocks stacked.

Being freshmen with little to no experience in machine planning and fabrication, I and my mate Sam were given the task of learning the operation of 3D printing and Laser cutting machines at the DfX lab at USF, while learning basics of CAD development. The experience brought a huge personal growth in me as it gave me an opportunity to mingle my novice ideas with senior experience developers in the team.

Few months down the road, our team divided the work in sub branches with so-called "experts" leading each sub-branch. I was helping the hardware team with brain storming of the idea, and simultaneously was leading the 3D printing and laser cutting branch. (Yeah, it sounds crazy, but I printed and laser cut over 40 specimens in few months, which were enough for the Southeastcon team to make me the leader). Above is a picture of our CAD design, primarily created and rendered by Nick and Mason.

We were able to print, laser cut (wood), and assemble the robot. Above is a picture of the finalized robot after assembly (Looks quite similar to CAD). Just a week before leaving for the competition at Rileah, NC, first major traces of Coronavirus were reported in The States, and hence the conference got cancelled. Due to the sudden closure of USF, our team members didn't even got a chance to take fancy pictures with the robot.

Nevertheless, the experience of working with highly motivated individuals on new things spurred a massive growth in me, especially in the fields of machine designing, tools such as 3D printing and laser cutting, machine assembly, and CADing. I hope to spread my knowledge in these domains to upcoming students through my participation in different projects and outreach activities.