Kyle Morrissey
Mechanical Engineer
Projects at Canary
My experience at Canary as a mechanical engineer was much different than the experience at Waters. Canary introduced me to the work life of a start up. The fast paced environment and product development type of job was something I have always wanted. At Canary, I was able to apply all my technical and professional skills to help the company release a brand new product, The Canary View. This involved some cost down analysis as well as design changes to meet a specific goal. I fortunately was lucky enough to take part in such an incredible experience. I was also involved in various testing that allowed me to use NX/SolidWorks to create fixtures to make testing easier for everyone. I also had to stay up for late night phone calls to support our manufacturing team in China. It was incredible important to make sure all our manufacturing processes were running smoothly. There were many projects I was apart of at Canary, but below you can preview just a couple of them that I have worked on.
IR Cut Analysis
Problem Statement:
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4-6ft drops of the Canary Flex device are causing the IR cut filter to fail
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The mechanism inside the housing that operates the movement of the filter gets jammed
Procedure:
Testing:
•Drop testing was completed on 6 Flex units
-2 units at 50 °C,
-2 units at -10 °C
-2 units at room temperature (23 °C)
•Drops per unit (1 cycle =Front, Back, Top, Bottom, Right, Left) :
-6 drops x 4 cycles @ 4ft
-6 drops x 2 cycles @ 6ft
Possible Root Cause:
• The Filter gets jammed because the arm travels upwards on the pin; The metal piece below the arm is not properly secured and can travel upwards during a shock event, like when being dropped
Actions:
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Testing and analysis was performed to see how certain drops could affect the IR cut lens mechanism
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I contacted our manufacturers to let them know the problem and what could be done to fix it (strengthen components within the mechanism)
Canary Cam Design
Objective
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Transform a Canary 1 into a portable video camera by designing a housing to hold an external battery as well as production optics and components
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Help to train computer vision
Procedure:
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NX was used to model a camera to hold the in-house components
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Dimensions were chosen to fit the respective components
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Model was printed using a 3-D printer (Makerbot)
Conclusion:
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Instead of carrying around one of the Canary Devices, the company can now use this portable camera to capture images and help to train computer vision
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The Canary Cam has a power switch, phone holder and integrated front IR Panel as seen in the pictures below
