My name is Charlie Lockyer; I’m a sophomore from Baker College majoring in computer science with a minor in engineering design.  I’m from Baltimore, Maryland and at Rice I am part of Rice Eclipse, the Rice club lacrosse team, and lots of Baker IM sports.  I’ve been interested in engineering design my whole life and hope to learn more about prototyping techniques in this course so I can take my own personal projects to the next level.

One recent thing I made that I’m proud of is the robotic drinking device I made last semester for ENGI 200.  We designed it in order to help our client, who has cerebral palsy, drink liquids without any external assistance.  It used a lot of 3D-printed components and overall worked really well.

This semester, I both want to further my 3D-printing design skills and learn how to work well with materials such as wood and metal.  On the 3D-printing side, I specifically want to learn how to do print-in-place design since I haven’t done this before.  For other materials, I would like to learn how to better design parts to be manufacturable, because in the world of 3D-printing pretty much everything you draw in CAD is manufacturable.  With subtractive techniques or casting parts, everything isn’t as easy, and I feel it will really push me to design better parts overall.

One thing I really want to learn is both how to use most of the machines in the machine shop and how the processes/systems at the OEDK that govern machine usage work.  With things like the 3D printers, you can just log on and print things after doing training, and for most things in the machine shop you’ll need a lab tech, but for some machines where there is a gray area on the usage rules I would like to become more confident in my skills on them so I know I’m using them properly if I am doing it alone.