Senior Design Project - University of Colorado, Boulder

Project: Animal Care Systems (Company), Mechanized Motor Kit

Role: Test Engineer

The mechanized motor kit is an add-on for Animal Care System’s Optimice 100 animal carousel – these units are used for monitoring mice in laboratory settings. In order to make it the most comfortable for the nocturnal animals, the desired monitoring scenario is overnight. Instead of sending a technician to perform observation, the add-on kit we developed could be used to remotely monitor the mice and rotate the chassis. The main learning goals over the project were:

Client/Server side scripting for a server hosted on a Raspberry Pi for signal output through a web-interface
Specifying components and integrating an electrical system to rotate the carousel (PSU, Bi-Polar stepper motor, stepper driver, controller)
Understanding micro-stepping for stepper motors and the associated torque losses
Noise and vibration testing

For this project, students were assigned to teams of 6 to simulate working with other engineers on a project. Within our team, I elected to be the test engineer on the project. My duties included creating a test plan to satisfy all the design requirements and specifications. Additionally, I determined the hardware used in the design as well as the full integration of components.