ASME UD kicked off our participation in the ASME E-Fest East 2018 (held at Penn State this year) with a roaring start, with a delegation eleven members strong proudly representing the University of Delaware. Below are the reflections of first-time E-Fest attendees Tiange and Juan upon of a fun-filled day of activities.
With Photography by Juan Zamudio and Christopher Kitson
This is my first time to observe a competition about student designed robots. From my impression, robots are always built with complicated control system, expensive sensors, and seem quite difficult to understand without strong electrical engineering background. However, in the heat of competition I realized that most of the best preforming designs were based on fairly simple, and basic components. This spurred the realization that my fear of the unfamiliar stopped me; stopped me before I even tried to learn new things last year when I was a sophomore. If I may offer some words of wisdom to current freshmen and sophomores: do not be terrified by the unfamiliar. Although you may have been barely exposed with a cursory introduction, suspend your disbelief and just give it a try. Even if you are bewildered at first, you may realize that you are capable of anything if you apply yourself to it. If you do not take the first steps into a much larger world, you will ultimately regret it. After all, things will likely fall into place to make the seemingly incomprehensible quite manageable in retrospect.
In addition, the workshops and sessions I attended thus far were eye-opening to me. I now realize there are still so many frontiers of knowledge we have yet to explore as college students, though others have blazed these paths before us. Our ASME peers from other universities are doing an awesome job as I watch and learn! These student sections from other universities all have well established and competitive teams present; the ASME UD chapter could learn a thing or two from them in order to attract more talented engineering students from UD involved in our ranks. Overall, I feel that these students are truly missing out, and hope they will someday attend these sorts of competitions to, test their mettle, meet other top engineering students, and have a great experience. This was my first ASME conference with my Mechanical Engineering friends, and I truly enjoyed proudly representing the Delaware Blue Hens with them!
Editor’s Note: Tiange did an excellent job representing ASME UD in the Old Guard Poster Competition today, taking home second place overall and a giant check to boot. Congratulations!
With writing by Tiange Zhang, edited by Christopher Kitson
While attending the second day of ASME E-Fest, I found the Stratasys 3D-printing booth in the sponsor lobby to be the most intriguing. The gentleman at the booth rightly pointed out that most engineers continue to use the mindset of subtractive manufacturing processes, thus limiting the scope and functionality of their designs to be less than their true potential. He advocated students should learn or advance their knowledge of additive manufacturing techniques to produce future parts, perhaps also utilizing the 3D-printing machines his company makes. Furthermore, his company has managed to 3D-print using different material and color combinations in order to produce realistic items, and offer an increasingly functional alternative to the currently prevalent ABS and PLA plastics used as 3D-printer stock filament. He was also quick to point out that an additive process is far more efficient from a material usage standpoint than a traditional subtractive one.
On another note, I found the robotics competition to be the most enjoyable part of the day. The matches only got increasingly interesting as the excitement built the further we progressed in the ASME Robots Student Design Competition. Although we didn’t make it to the semifinals, we still had a blast competing with universities from all over the east coast and the midwest.
With writing by Juan Zamudio, edited by Christopher Kitson