Hello everyone! I hope everyone’s having a good day today. I want to share a little bit more about myself, as I recently just joined EDES 210 for this fall semester.
Who am I in the first place?
My name is Adam Vuong, and I am a current senior bioengineering student from Will Rice College with a minor in engineering design and a certificate in Chinese Language and Communication. It may sound like a lot on my plate, but I am enjoying my Rice experience so far and looking forward to wrapping up my senior year on a great note.
What do I like to do?
I do like to say that I am engaged in many things. In fact, I do have involvement in and out of my college.
I’m currently one of the chief engineers for Rice Escape, an organization that builds escape rooms that people in the Rice community can play in for free! I help with the technical aspect of the puzzles, which may include fixing the electronics of a programmed lighting system or ensuring that an RFID-based puzzle functions as intended. I am also one of the Traditions Committee heads of my college, spearheading the planning of the big events at my college, including Will Rice Week and Whale Day, with a team of dedicated Will Ricers.
I play for the Rice Marching Owl Band, where I get to showcase my Rice spirit by playing percussion instruments and bringing great music and cheer to football games, volleyball games, and more. Similarly, I also play the mascot of Will Rice, Pheaky, and bring spirit and cheer to the college and its members.
I honor my cultural heritage, engaging in activities on campus ranging from doing lion dancing with Rice Lions to performing Chinese tea ceremonies and serving home-brewed tea using my ceramic tea set. I am also a peer academic advisor, helping students plan their semesters and setting them up for academic success during their four years at Rice.
All this to say…I do a lot.
What kind of engineering do I do?
Honestly, it varies. But it’s safe to say that after completing my past projects, I can call the OEDK another home of mine.
Last year, I built a navigational assistance device for a blind dog with various mechanical engineering students, electrical engineering students, and students of other majors. We’ve called ourselves Kunde’s Friends, since the client dog we were making the device for is named Kunde. I learned a lot just from this project, from haptic feedback methods to material considerations for wearable devices and advanced electronic prototyping. I’m proud of what my team made, even as we had long meetings to fix our camera system or get our motors to vibrate properly, and I also enjoyed learning a lot from them as well!
A couple of pictures of Kunde with the navigation device prototype on during testing!
The year before that, I worked on an engineering project with bioengineering team members and Rice360 to develop a working low-cost ambient temperature and humidity monitoring device — all within 4 months. The device alarms users when the temperature or humidity goes above set thresholds. I’ve learned a lot working with this team, from electronic prototyping and breadboarding basics to designing complex 3D models using AutoCAD. In the end, we made a functional prototype that gave us satisfactory temperature and humidity test data and allowed users to adjust the thresholds depending on the weather conditions they are working in.
The poster in the 2023 OEDK showcase that contains our prototype and our testing data!
The final prototype of our monitoring device!
Outside of team engineering projects, I also engage in my own personal projects. One thing that I made was a set of 3D-printed keychains that honor the Year of the Snake. I did the design myself, using Adobe Illustrator to turn a simple snake image and an image of the Chinese character for snake (蛇) into vector graphics, after which I imported them into Fusion 360 and made a simple keychain design from there. I’m especially proud of how they turned out, and I gave some of them to my friends as gifts!
The snake keychains in two different colors!
What do I want to gain out of this class? What do I want to build in the future?
Over the summer, I’ve gained a lot of interest in cosplaying and building DIY personal projects. I especially gained interest in fabricating my own cosplay pieces for video game and movie franchises, such as Splatoon and the Star Wars series, since I went to a convention over the summer, where I gained some insight into researching and designing for cosplaying.
In general, I want to learn the techniques I need to design and create my own projects when I have the inspiration to do so. I’ve got a few in mind right now that I want to pursue in the future, including a ceramic tea set case and a bag where I can put all my handheld fans. I also want to have the practical skills to do effective prototyping, which will come in handy when I get to the prototyping stage of my senior design project.
In particular, I am excited to learn about plasma cutting and CNC milling, since these are techniques I have never learned before and would greatly help me in my projects, whether personal or team projects.
