Engineering by Design
EWB Challenge for a Cambodian village: a 50-drone delivery fleet chosen by weighted pairwise comparison, and a week-7 pencil study of a Merlin 1-D.
The EWB challenge
The group half of the Year 1 design unit was the Engineers Without Borders brief for Pu Ngaol, a village in Cambodia. In the wet season the dirt tracks flood and cut houses off from food, water and medicine; one family makes about ten motorbike trips to fill a 60 L water jar. We bounded the question to wet-season transport of goods and set criteria: cost, reach to the outskirts, repairability, weather, ease of use, payload, ecosystem disruption, sustainability. Then a Double Diamond: each of us worked up an option, pitched it, took feedback, went round again. Five options reached a weighted pairwise comparison matrix. Four-page A3 poster, presented 7 December 2023.
Fifty small drones
Small FPV-racing-style drones scored 3.18 against 2.99 for heavy-lift drones, with delivery robots, cable cars and rail behind. Sustainability carried the largest weight, 0.364, and a heavy-lift drone costs $20-50k each; a racing-class quad is about $200, flies about 4 km and about 30 minutes. So: a fleet of 50, quick-release motors and batteries so villagers can repair them, a hub on stilts between the village and the river serving a 2 km radius, solar charging, autonomous routing with the hub as datum. My part was the research on the existing drones the design was based on and the cost case for the small-drone route, then writing and formatting the final poster from the team's contributions.
Drawing
The individual portfolio opened with three hand-drawing exercises on grid paper. Week 3: top, front and side views of a verbally described part, with dimensions and a projection-symbol box. Week 4: an isometric view with a quarter-section, on isometric grid. Week 5: a two-point perspective with the construction lines left in to both vanishing points. Honest first-year pencil work, shown small.
A Merlin, by hand
Week 7 was an artefact study: pick an object, draw it, annotate it. I drew a SpaceX Merlin 1-D on grid paper, side, front and bottom views, and wrote in what I understood of it: a turbopump delivering propellant at high pressure, a preburner, the combustion chamber where RP-1 and liquid oxygen mix and ignite, a regeneratively cooled nozzle. Drawing no. 0001, Rev 1, November 2023. Fourteen months later I was Engine Lead on Bristol's first liquid engine, Engine 1, firing at 5.94 kN in January 2025. The plate at the top of this page puts the two side by side.
CAD
The CAD submission was two sheets on a line-following robot, released 4 December 2023. An assembly drawing with a 19-item parts list (gear motors and brackets, reflectance sensor array, step-down regulator, programmable module, dual serial motor controller, battery pack, ball caster, wheel assemblies), detail views at 2:1 and an isometric at 1:2, on a 179 by 125 mm footprint. And a part drawing of the 70 mm five-spoke wheel hub, with a section and detail views to 5:1. This robot is the Year 1 CAD exercise and is unrelated to the 2026 line-following minidrone project.
Poster
The four-page A3 poster as submitted, text selectable. A group deliverable; I wrote and formatted it from the team's contributions. It embeds product and stock photographs with their on-poster credits, which is why the pages appear here whole rather than cropped.
