Alex P. Martinez's home page

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  • Finite element program for solid mechanics
  • Vorticity-based Navier-Stokes solver
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  • Model of an adaptive growth process
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  • C++ matrix class for fftw
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Pizza making machine

For our final project for an Engineering design and engineering drawings course we had to make a pizza making machine. We were separated in teams of about 12 people. Our team was called Pizzamatic and I was one of the group coordinators. The pizza had to be made by a machine controlled from outside 2 standard sized tables and the machine was judged by the pizza’s taste (way too subjective in my opinion) and by the speed of the machine. The video of the final competition is shown below:

At 2:27 minutes into the video the 241 pizza (meaning 2 for 1 and the course code was mie241) group's machine is seen functioning. This was the best run in the competition. At 11:51 minutes my group’s machine is seen functioning. This was the second best run of the competition. We were discounted 2 seconds out of our time because the microwave was not plugged in when we closed the door. If we had those two seconds we could have won. At 13:00 minutes the Tornado group’s machine is seen functioning. Instead of having a different component of the machine in a different part of the track they had everything in the same place. The instructions only say that you have to dispense certain toppings in certain parts of the table. This was an inventive design but a very impractical one as seen in the video.