Family Day Projects

Once a year the GE Oil & Gas facility has a family day, and the ATO Lab prides itself on putting on the best show possible. These are some of the projects I made for family day over the years.

Bicycle Pump Race

Bike Race Photo

This was my first-ever LabVIEW automation project. Two players compete to inflate their bicycle tire to the target pressure in the shortest time. For each tire, I plumbed up a manifold with a pressure sensor, solenoid valve, and bicycle pump. Until the countdown starts, the solenoid valve bleeds pressure to avoid any cheating. Once the race starts, the valve closes and the players can inflate their tires. Once one of the tires reaches the goal pressure, a winner is announced and the solenoid valves open to bleed pressure and make ready for the next pair of challengers.

LabVIEW Pong

The classic game pong re-imagined with LabVIEW! Based off the LabVIEW Simple PONG 2 player game in the NI community pages. I modified the code to take in an integer as the pong paddle’s position, and then I wired up a couple of laser distance sensors to provide the player’s location. We flipped a projector 90° to face the floor, and I modified the interface to be white on black with square “pixels” for a retro experience.

Ultrasonic Instrument

IMG_6188 Crop

Taking inspiration from my Theremax project, this simple device takes in a distance reading from an industrial ultrasonic sensor and generates a tone from a speaker and lights up a ping pong ball using an RGB LED.

Mini Flow Loop

IMG_0228

I wired and set up the proportional valve, flow rate sensor, pressure sensor, and temperature sensor on this small-scale flowloop and wrote the software to control it. Its purpose is to show how flow rate and flow restriction influence pressure and temperature in flow.