Hi, my name is Vivian Trommer, and I am interning at Colorado School of Mines. I am working with Professor Petruska, two of his PhD students, and a master’s student this summer. We are working on making a 1/6th scale self-driving, electric race car using an RC car (the Super Baja Rey 2.0).
I started the week out by meeting everyone in the lab and getting myself situated. I met my mentor, Professor Petruska, and his students. Eugene and Seth are PhD students who are working on their thesis projects, which revolve around magnets. Mabel is a master’s student working on the project that the lab worked on last summer with a Pintern, the moon rover.
I started out trying to get the car set up, but we quickly realized that we had the wrong adapters to connect the battery to the ESC. We got the car from Professor Brodsky, who is a Mechanical Engineering professor at Mines, and she offered to give me a tour of Mines’ automotive department and also give us the right adapters.
A big part of my work this week was learning how to use SolidWorks, which is a CAD software. My job this week was to design mounts for the sensors to go on the car. The learning curve for SolidWorks is pretty steep, but I think I’ve gotten a lot better at it than I was at the beginning of the week. Once I had a design for the mounts, I would 3D print them and see if they could work. I printed three models this week, and none of them were exactly what we were looking for, so I will continue to design more next week.
My designs for the sensor mounts
When I tried to start the car when we got the correct adapters, I realized that while the motor was running, the wheels were not rotating. I suspected that there was something wrong with the driveshaft, and when I took the car apart, I found that the pinion gear (the gear attached to the motor) was not interacting with the gears attached to the driveshaft. Once I fixed that, the car ran very smoothly!
The pinion gear attached to the motor of the car
Outside of the lab this week, I did a lot of fun activities with my half sister and her husband, who I am staying with. On Sunday, we went to the Denver Chalk Festival, which was lots of fun and a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. On Thursday, it was my nephew’s birthday, so we had a Bluey-themed party and barbecue. My sister and I also got to go to the Denver Performing Arts Center to watch a Broadway musical because her friend had extra tickets. Finally, on Saturday, we went to see the new Wes Anderson Movie, The Phonicien Scheme, at the Alamo theater. At the Alamo, you order dinner before the movie and then eat while watching.
My sister and I at the Denver Performing Arts Center
Overall, it was an amazing first week, and I can not wait to keep learning!
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