My first full engineering project, built from scratch in 11th-grade Engineering Sciences at Lycée Pierre Mendès France in Tunis. An automatic syringe pump that delivers a controlled infusion to hospitalized patients with minimal human action, driven by a stepper-motor rack-and-pinion and controlled from a phone app. This was the project that made me fall in love with engineering.
Deliver an infusion controlled by time, quantity, and flow rate
Limit human intervention to reduce the risk of dosing errors
Control the pump from a phone app
Go through the full engineering cycle: needs analysis, design, fabrication, programming, testing
Started with a functional analysis of the need: who and what the system serves (the patient, the injected product, the medical staff) and what it must do, deliver a product at a controlled, selectable flow rate. This set the specifications the rest of the project had to meet.
Worked through the key design decisions as a team: which transmission (worm screw vs. rack and pinion), which motor (stepper vs. DC), and which controller (Arduino vs. micro:bit). We chose a rack-and-pinion driven by a stepper motor and controlled by an Arduino, for simplicity, controllable power, and precise, repeatable motion.
Designed the mechanism and enclosure in CAD, then brought it to life: 3D-printed the moving parts and laser-cut the acrylic housing. The rack-and-pinion converts the stepper's rotation into the linear push that drives the syringe plunger.
Wrote the Arduino control program to drive the stepper at the commanded flow rate, and built a phone app so a user could set the infusion parameters and start or stop the pump without touching the hardware.
Assembled the full system and ran the first tests, checking that the pump delivered fluid steadily at the set rate and responded correctly to the app. We iterated on the fit and the control until the prototype ran reliably, all within the four-week deadline.
We delivered a working automatic syringe pump prototype within the four-week schedule: a phone-controlled device that drives a syringe through a stepper-motor rack-and-pinion to deliver fluid at a set rate, exactly what the brief asked for. Beyond the device itself, this is the project that got me hooked on engineering. It was my first time going from a blank page to working hardware, my first full engineering cycle, and the first time I felt the pull of turning an idea into something real. Everything I have done since, from rocket feed systems to pressure-vessel analysis, started here.