For a start, here are some shots from when I was a Lab Assistant for 2.007 – that’s MIT’s introductory design and robotics course for mechanical engineers.

In keeping with the theme of photographic exploration, I decided to experiment a little with bokeh photography. After a brief test with an extremely boring triangular aperture, I quickly moved on to a much more aggressive cut:

I got some interesting stuff, in spite of the fact that it was literally impossible to focus with that cap in place. I didn’t have the tripod or the patience to remove the cap, focus, and replace the cap before taking each picture, but you can see what I managed below.

This box is about as simple as they come; it’s a modified version of Bruce Viney’s Cubey box that is double the size but still uses 1/8″ plywood.

So I cut the box out, glued it all together, played with it – good times, but as I already have plenty of hidey-holes it was a little purposeless.  Last night, however, I realized that with classes starting again I needed a new place to stash my alarm clock to prevent my AM-self from turning it off too quickly and falling back asleep.

Serendipity.

It’s a little cruel to early-morning Nick, but that guy’s a jerk.

My laptop speaks to my love of comics, robots, and fighting said robots.

My roommate is nearly as much of a video game nerd as I am, and it’s starting to show in our apartment.

My one regret: I haven’t even broken open the red and green contact paper yet.

The double-whammy of not much sleep and a blood donation left me fairly loopy this afternoon. Once I determined I was incapable of completing any actual work, I decided to mess around with the etching capabilities of my lab’s laser cutter (as an alternative to the time-consuming but very distinctive etching I’ve done before).

My friend Laura is a biology major who loves gifts and keychains, so I went for a threefer!

Stay tuned for more experimentations with varying power and etch depth.

Self-effacement aside, I think I took some very wonderful pictures.  I’ve included a few of my favorites below, and you can see the rest in this Flickr set.

Recently, however, I discovered that the CNC mill at the hobby shop can take DXFs directly!  Thus, my CNC DIY etched lighting lives again.  I’ll eventually make 5 or 6 of these and string them along my walls for ambient lighting, but I wanted to show off the first two out of the etcher.

Squids and Autobots.  Because they’re awesome.

In that spirit: 6.115 is over!  For all you non-MIT types, the 6 means it is an electrical engineering / computer science class (the EE side in this case).  Throughout the course we programmed 8051 microcontrollers to do all sorts of ridiculous things, like drive CT scanners and robotic arms and act as feedback controllers for variable power supplies.  The actual classroom portion ended about a month ago, at which point we were all sent forth to work on individual final projects – everything from speech interpreters to pen plotters to glove-based robotic controllers.

In honor of my mechatronics roots, I decided to make a ball and plate feedback control system.  After constructing the system from leftover delrin and ABS stock, I soldered IR LED and phototransistor arrays onto perfboard and bolted them to the table.  By scanning through the LEDs and reading the phototransistors, I was able to determine the X-Y position of the ball on the plate.  Running that through a PD controller and sending the command to hobby servos beneath the table made everything work like magic!  (Or not; implementing a digital controller with coarse position measurement in assembly with no floating point math is difficult).

In case that made no sense: enjoy the video and pictures! My friend Clare posted some lovely macro shots of the various lab kits during demonstration day as well.