April 15, 2016

Writing smart things on the board!

One group's tower.

This day's club meeting starts at 2:00 in the computer lab above the engineering room. This week's meeting mostly focuses on groups 3D printing their towers, as well as a short presentation from club member, Sean Allen.



Sean tells the club members about an idea for a video game controller that he has been working on using a kit from Arduino. Sean hopes to create a video game controller that responds to muscle movement in a player's upper arm. Such a controller would allow forearm amputees to continue gaming.

Result of writing smart things on the board!

After Sean's presentation, the club advisor, Laura, as well as club members Ben B and Ilya K, help Sean continue working on the controller. 

Meanwhile, Austin helps another member with filling in his tower in Solidworks.



The club meeting is officially adjourned at 4 o'clock, when we get kicked out of the computer lab. We look forward to seeing everybody next week!

April 8, 2016

The day's club meeting officially starts at 2:03. The members use SolidWorks to continue designing their towers.
Nothing else notable happens, (except for groups' progress on their towers) as many club members are not present at this particular meeting. And Tihani shows up late! Cough cough! 
The club meeting is officially adjourned at 2:57.

March 25, 2016

Today's meeting was held in the computer lab, Room 19-124. The meeting's objective was to introduce members to SolidWorks in order to start 3D printing groups' designs for our tower project.

Ben at work on his tower

At 2:08, the club's ICC representative (Ben B.) informs about the events of Wednesday's ICC meeting. At 2:17, Austin starts teaching club members on how to make a cube and cut a hole in it. How exciting!
From there, members continue designing their towers, and start experimenting with DegreeWorks.




The club meeting is officially adjourned at 2:57, but club members are encouraged to go down to the regular engineering room, where another club member discusses prospects of launching rockets into the air after regular meeting hours.
This unofficial continuation of the meeting ends at 3:32, and we hope to see everybody at the next club meeting.

March 11, 2016

An example of a 3D printed tower.

At 2:15, Austin (club president) starts the meeting, welcomes new members, and introduces a new, multi-week project regarding 3D printing towers and testing them. This idea is building off of the paper towers from last week. Austin briefly describes SolidWorks, the program groups will be using to 3D print their towers. 

After laying down some ground rules for the project regarding the minimum and maximum height, amount of plastic available for use, and internal designs, various ideas of towers are sketched up, and printing techniques are discussed. As Austin thinks about the point system of judging towers, club members get into groups.

Thinking about towers' inner support structures.

2:31 – Sean and Ilya show up late. Cough cough!

At 3:15, a couple of groups finish sketching their designs, and Austin declares the meeting officially adjourned, though members are always welcome to hang around for a while longer. We look forward to the next club meeting!

February 26, 2016

At 2:11 pm, the club's president, Austin, introduced a design competition scheduled for that day. Members were to get into groups of 2-3 and design a tower (using no more than 10 pieces of paper, 2 ft of tape, and 5 rubber bands) that could hold up at least 1 textbook. The towers had to be at least 15 inches tall. 

Two teams hard at work on their paper towers.

  









After approximately 1.5 hours, the testing and judging of the towers began. Only two towers were able to hold 1 textbook. Congratulations to Austin Djang and his cylindrical tower, as well as Ilya Kravchenko and Sean Allen's five-columned construction. 
 

Five columns design by new members Ilya & Sean.

After a brief discussion on projects for the next club meeting (involving designing constructing towers using 3-D printing), the meeting was officially adjourned at 3:56. As always, members were encouraged to stick around. We look forward to seeing everybody in two weeks. 

One group's paper tower.