Derek J. Schaper

I was contracted to design and construct this Douglas fir table in my grade 11 year. My client gave me some inspirational pictures and fancied the table having a "stacked" appearance similar to an inuksuk. I sketched up some ideas, got approval from my client, and proceeded to draft up the plans and 3D model. Once the final design was approved, I began fashioning the table from fine Douglas fir wood stock. The end result is pictured above in my very pleased client's house.

This chess table was my first carpentry project at the start of highschool. When designing it, I wanted to create the illusion of the chess board floating in air, and thus the double glass top. Building this table is when I truly fell in love with carpentry. Besides chess, this table turned out to be great for most any board game, and we still use it to this day.

This little rover utilized an array of solenoids to detect and follow the magnetic field generated by an oscillating current in a wire track. According to the UBC course, it had to interpret signals along the track to know when to either make a turn, or stay straight when it came to split junctions. Lesson learned: always have a discharging resistor with your capacitor.

This UBC Engineering Physics project course is one of the reasons I selected the program. Provided only with the microcontroller affectionately named TINAH, we were tasked with building a robot that would autonomously play Indiana Jones retrieving ancient artifacts from a temple. Once the artifacts were retrieved, our robot would have to either zipline to safety, or brave the boulder that would follow it down the hill on the way out. With the exception of tires and motors, our group of 4 engineering students had to build this thing from scratch. Needless to say, designing, prototyping, machining, coding, wiring, and troubleshooting our team's robot (Clark) was simultaneously exhilarating and stressful beyond belief. Our design boasted a retrieval crane, modified Ackermann steering, and a self-hoisting tower (up to 7kg). Come competition day, we made it to quarter finals before being eliminated by another excellent group. This is the project that convinced me robotics is the way to go.

In conjunction with robotics, I find virtual and augmented reality to be fascinating and awesome. I joined the UBC engineering club Open Robotics to have access to an Oculus Rift which I intended to create a surrogate experience with. The idea is that as the human controller's head moves, the remote robot's head moves in sync, and a live stream from two cameras in the robot head would fill the Oculus display, putting the human controller in the robot's shoes. I got so far as to integrate the motion mimicry before work and other projects took priority, but this is still on my todo list as soon as I get some free time. Check out the Open Robotics project page here for a video demonstration and more information.

In my first year at UBC, I joined the UBC Orbit engineering club which designs and builds cube satellites as part of the Canadian Satellite Design Challenge. I was involved in the structural/mechanical sub-team and worked on designing and testing a de-orbiting balloon. Our design was to demonstrate the feasibility of de-orbiting a satellite come its end-of-life, rather than leaving it dead in orbit as space junk hazardous to other satellites, stations, and spacecraft.