Pet Bowl Report

During my freshmen year, I took a class called Introduction to Design with Dr. McCormack. One of the projects that I worked on in the course was the Pet Bowl Design Report, where students selected a project in which the professor intended to have students use the knowledge obtained through previous engineering classes and take it to another step in a three week long project with a final report deliverable. My project team was compromised of me, Dereck Beck, Colleen Nicole, and Joshua Eckels. We designed a pet water bowl that would automatically notify the pet owner when the water bowl needed to be refilled. The most innovative feature of the design was the use of the Hall Effect Sensor to light up an LED at the front of the pet bowl once the water level neared empty. One challenge that I faced during this project was the implementation of the Hall Effect Sensor on the prototype. Because the Hall Effect Sensor requires a magnet to function, we had to play around with many different magnets and flotation devices before finally getting the prototype to consistently work. As seen on page 11, we were able to address the strengths and weaknesses of the pet bowl design without getting lost in specific technical work. It’s extremely important for mechanical engineers to use technical jargon appropriately, and through the write-up of the Pet Bowl Report, I was able to showcase my ability to write a technical document for company executives.