Digi Digits

The cornerstone of my engineering involvement outside of classwork and research at Penn State was with Digi Digits, a student-run engineering organization. For a majority of my involvement in the club, we focused on designing 3D printed prosthetic training devices. We were partnered with the E-nable community, which is an open source community hosting designs that could be adapted for use as assistive devices. I led the club in senior year, and piloted a project where I printed several hand assembly kits to ship out to our members. COVID-19 limited us to meeting virtually, but this effort allowed us to have some form of physical collaboration. These assembled hands were then donated to the E-nable community.

The club had several projects and initiatives in addition to hand printing. Education and outreach had been a focus since the club's inception, which normally involved us bringing a 3D printer and models to a local elementary school to host high-level workshops. COVID-19 prevented this for my senior year, so we decided to shift to a virtual workshop format with high school engineering/science classes. We took a more technical approach, going through the process of designing and printing a model from start to end.

The projects piloted during this time period were a bridge design competition and an electronic hand project. For the bridge designs, we prototyped a shear testing setup using buckets of sand, a load measuring gauge, and a wooden carriage. The bridge testing setup was put together with the eventual intention of testing the strength of various lattice structures. My involvement in the electronic hand project was more organizational rather than design, but I helped draft some models which are shown here. Finally, I also calibrated a dual extruder printer for the club to use after I graduated.