Fly Power Tower
Designed and built a device to induce fatigue in fruit flies for WSU's biology department. Motorized shelf mechanism, repeatable protocol, actually worked.
WSU’s biology department needed a device to fatigue fruit flies for genetics research. The brief was unusual: build something that disrupts the flies’ climbing behavior repeatedly and consistently, without harming them in any other way.
How it works
A frame holds a set of shelves, each loaded with test tubes containing flies. A motorized arm lifts the shelves and releases them — they fall under gravity, causing the flies inside to drop just as they’ve started climbing back up. Repeat this cycle continuously, and the flies accumulate fatigue in a controlled, measurable way.
The mechanism needs to be consistent: same drop height, same timing, same force every cycle. Repeatability is what makes the experiment valid.
What made it interesting
The requirements weren’t mine. In most engineering projects, you’re solving a problem you already understand. Here, the constraint set came from biology — I had to understand why the flies needed to fall at a particular rate, what “fatigue” meant in a research context, and how to make the data reproducible.
The mechanical design is simple. The interesting part was learning to ask the right questions of the people who actually knew what the experiment needed.
What came out of it
A working device now in use in the biology department. And a better instinct for interdisciplinary work — most real engineering problems involve people who think about the world differently than you do.