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UCI's Engineering 7A: Introduction to Engineering
2023-12-13 | By Antonio Velasco
Landing as a freshman undergraduate electrical engineering student at UC Irvine, I wasn't exactly too sure about what an engineer does. Yeah, I knew that they contribute to making huge projects and innovating, but in terms of what their everyday tasks would look like, I was pretty clueless. Additionally, I found myself looking through the course schedule and dreading the amount of exams and theory that I'd have to go through before getting hands-on. For me, Engineering 7A ended up being that "knight in shining armor" that made my introduction to engineering a lot smoother and more fun.
Course Overview
Engineering 7A is an optional elective Introduction to Engineering course offered by UC Irvine. Course equivalents elsewhere would also be an Intro to Engineering course, typically taken in your first term. Within the course, we're introduced to SolidWorks, project planning, budgeting, manufacturing, basic electronics, 3D printing, and woodshop work. An all-around experience of the engineering design process with a fun project to work on an RC rover that, in the end, we'll be racing against each other with. Best of all, there's no experience required! Just a can-do attitude and a willingness to engineer!
The course starts with a ton of basics, touching on CADing and woodshop techniques that would be helpful. We were put into teams to work together on our final project, and over time worked on a bill of materials, a ton of designing, and a final technical presentation.
Tips and Tricks
Some helpful tips and tricks that I'd have for the course would be to delegate everything early and stay on top of deadlines. Especially since this is a freshman course, it gets easy to get caught up in adjusting to college life and falling behind on some work. It's important to be able to get everything done in a timely matter so that you'll have time to debug and optimize. That leads me to my next point--things will go wrong! That's just a fundamental part of the chaos of engineering. Something will break or something won't work, and that's okay. Ensure that you not only have the time to deal with this, but the right positive attitude going into it. Our rover simply wouldn't work halfway through, leading us to put in hours of overtime to chop it up and rebuild it altogether.
With such a fun goal and end product, it’s easy to be motivated. I found myself staying overtime on multiple occasions to get the details just right. We were given freedom from start to finish with designing the rover--even creating our own 3D-printed steering system from scratch, which is easier said than done! Everything, outside of the motors system, was designed and manufactured by us alone!
Parts Involved and Things to Know
Below is our schematic, featuring an ESC, receiver (and a remote to control it), buck converter to step down the voltage, motors, a battery to power it all, and finally a servo to move the steering. You're given all the electrical parts since that's standardized, but in terms of the steering, chassis, and axle, it was all organic and on our own.
Going onto the competition, it was similar to an F1 "qualifying" session where all 60 teams would run through a course to try to get the best time. The top 10 teams would qualify for the finals--something that we, after a ton of runs and optimizing, accomplished!
In the finals, we once again ran through a course for the fastest time, but this time it was outside amongst a live audience (which included our Dean of Engineering!) and featured a much harder course. See our run below!
Wrap-Up and Next Steps
Overall, it was a great starter course, especially as a freshman. There was never a class in Engineering 7A that I dreaded going to, and I had fun the entire time. After taking this class, it's a great idea to enroll in the following course in the series: Engineering 7B, where you'll design and program an autonomous rover, portable fitness device, or a "lab-on-a-chip." It may also be beneficial to look into the more advanced MAE CADing courses, as this provides enough of a base to hop into further CAD courses!
If you're heading to UCI, definitely include this class in your freshman schedule!
Hong Kong, China