Tinker Contest Tackles COVID Pet Peeves
By Patrick L. Kennedy
Are you six feet away from that person? For much of the pandemic, that question was more than academic, but few of us can tell without a tape measure. One ENG student created a kind of laser pointer that answers that question, and it took top honors in the spring 2021 COVID Solution Design Competition—followed by a hat that emits a shrill beep when you try to touch your face, and a doorway device that checks for proper mask usage.
The competition was sponsored by the Binoy K. Singh Imagineering Laboratory (a.k.a. “Tinker Lab”), a makerspace where students are free to pursue self-guided, extracurricular engineering projects. The Tinker Lab holds a variety of design competitions; the focus of this past semester’s contest was “trying to solve one of your COVID-induced pet peeves.” Submissions were judged on their creativity, design, usefulness, documentation, and build quality.
PhD student Joseph Hall earned first prize ($300) with the Isolaser, a modified laser pointer that can be attached to a smart phone. Its double-barreled red diode lasers intersect six feet away: If you see two red dots on someone, back away until the dots converge. Hall hooked the diodes up to a simple circuit board, a 3-volt button battery, and a press-to-close button switch, housing it all in a case he 3D-printed out of polylactide.
Hall easily mounted the Isolaser to a smart phone, and he wrote in his submission that alternatively it could be attached to a belt, hat, or clipboard, depending on how stealthily the user wants to take the measurement.
Second prize ($200) went to Mikayla Crowley (’23) and Rebecca Janes (’23) for the COVID-19 Contact Alert Hat, intended to break our ingrained face-touching habits. The hat uses an Ultrasonic Distance Sensor and a piezo capsule to flash and beep at the approach of an errant finger or hand. To make the sound effective, “it was decided that a duration of two seconds and a pitch of 300Hz was appropriately annoying and aggressive,” the students wrote.
Do Crowley and Janes expect people to wear the hat for the rest of their lives? No, but after wearing it for a day or two, users will quickly realize how often they’ve been touching their faces, and will become accustomed to quashing the impulse to rub that forehead—even if they’re toiling to solve a complex engineering problem, as Janes demonstrates in a video.
Axel S. Toro (’24) and Jose Batlle (’24) finished in third ($100) with Maskon. With a Rasberry Pi, recycled materials such as plywood, and “some AI magic,” the pair built a device to check that users are wearing masks correctly. As they demonstrate in a video, the Maskon could be posted at the entrance to a building or room. Flashing red lights mean you need to adjust your mask or put one on (an attached box holds a supply of freebies). Flashing green, you’re good to go.
Importantly, even the winning submissions included frank self-assessments and outlined ways to improve the product. It would be unreasonable to expect busy full-time students to turn out flawless products in a few weeks. The question is, do they know what the prototype’s weaknesses are, and how would they address those weaknesses if they had the time and resources?
All of this spring’s winners laid out detailed plans for honing their products in the future. Of course, in this case, one hopes that—thanks to the heroic scientists and engineers who developed COVID-19 vaccines—the students never need to follow up on those plans. But the exercise, like the competition as a whole, can only make them better engineers.